Corrupt 160gb Lacie Ext. HD, I/O error

Question

First, the specs:
Powerbook G4
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (1.2)
Number Of CPUs: 1
CPU Speed: 1.67 GHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 512 KB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 167 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.9.1f3
Here's my issue:
I purchased a Lacie 160gb firewire 600 external harddrive designed by Porsche. Stored on said drive was an entire feature film in Final Cut Pro format, including FCP files, capture scratch, and render files, etc. The drive functioned normally for approximately 5 months until yesterday, when capturing more footage, the drive failed to respond and umounted itself.
Presuming it was the casing/IDE ribbon/general IO corruption causing the error, I purchased another external casing - CompUsa brand, with 2 firewire 600 ports and 1 USB 2.0. After switching the drive from the lacie casing to the additional external casing, the same problem occurred.
I ran the disk utility. It recognized the drive as I had named it (Turbo 911... Ironic, No?) so I tried to run a verify and repair on the disk, and came up with this error message:
Verify and Repair disk “TURBO911”
** /dev/disk1s1
** Phase 1 - Read FAT
Unable to read FAT (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 non HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
I attempted to connect the drive to other mac systems, including an iMac G4 and Powermac G5, but no dice. I ran PROSOFT Data Rescue II and tried to recover the data, which I can successfully complete at any given time... However, it will only allow me to recover the CBR folder and subfolders therein, meaning that I lost the names of all the files, meaning that it will be nearly impossible to reconnect all the files in final cut, meaning that I'll essentially have to start from square one, meaning that I'm sitting here with my head in my hands, listening to rammstein and trying to fix my drive via ESP. I'm considering opening iSledgeHammer and using it on my hard drive, followed by iDrinkingBinge and iGoBackToBeingBroke. In the mean time, iNeedSleep and tiLenol. Thanks in advance for whatever help you may be able to offer... at this juncture, I'd rather hear that the four horsemen of the apocalypse are steadily and hastily making their way towards Miami than "Sorry, no luck, abandon all hope, resistance is futile."
Thanks,
Darren Perlmutter
Darren[dawt]Perlmutter[aht]gmail[dawt]com

Answer 1

... my computer wouldn't start up it just went to the grey apple screen and then hung. So I started it in single user mode and fsck -fy it and it came up with invalid node structure, disk i/o error.
You need Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro to fix that error, Disk Utility, as you found, won't. And booting from your DVD to run DU would be older than what you installed on your LaCie.
Looking this up I found that this probably means a dead HD
AHT doesn't look at the file structure or directory and all you have is a corrupt directory. If Disk Warrior can't fix it, you can erase the drive and should be fine. Would be better to erase with the option "zero all" though.
And you should always have backups of your data and bootable emergency drive, which you now have.
What does this mean?
Did the power go out or did you force the computer to shutdown? that is the most common. Filling a drive beyond 85% can also. You have 153GB, so that means you should have no more than 138GB or so used.
For $75 you can get 300GB or 500GB for $127 and up to $168.
I didn't back anything up... without expensive data recovery costs?
Disk Utility can. Restore tab. You'll want to have a 160GB partition to restore to. Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3 is another http://www.bombich.com
I've got a Dual 2 Ghz PowerPc G5 with 512 MB DDR SDRAM and a 160 Western Digital internal HD running OS X 10.4
I would want to upgrade RAM with at least 1GB (2 x 512) or 2 x 1GB. And make sure you have two backups and a 2nd internal drive. A new and larger drive will also perform better, and let you use your old drive after you reformat it as data backup.