Can't archive & install mac mini

Last night the Mac Mini at my mother's place was working fine. This morning, it will only get as far as the grey screen and cursor. I cannot do a safe boot. It is running 10.4.11. It's a 1.25 GHz, with 1GB RAM.
The hardware tests are fine. I repaired permissions.
When I tried doing disc repair, I encountered problems:
Overlapped extent allocation (numerous files)
Volume bit map needs repair
Invalid volume free block count
The volume needs to be repaired.
Then, the repair failed. Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit.
I am unable to do an archive and reinstall. Is there any way I can avoid wiping the disk?
Thanks,
Nicky

Hi Nicky
Sounds like a serious problem with the hard drive has developed? You do have options. What you could try is using target disk mode. If you have another mac with space to spare you could try this and quickly backup whatever data you can't do without. You should be able thereafter to boot from the installer disk, format the drive (hopefully) and reinstall.
You could forego the above try using DiskWarrior instead:
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html
It's probably the premier drive/directory repair utility available for the Mac platform? Although it's always a good idea to use as many as you can. You may find after trying everything you can the drive may still cause a problem. In which case a replacement drive will have to serve. Luckily for you they are not expensive. Any competent Apple Repair Specialist or appropriate dealer should be able to tackle this for you.
Tony

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Can't archive & install mac mini

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