Did I Kill My eMac? Dead hard Drive? Help if you can!

I don't know what happened, but here's the setup (Please help if you can). emac with 10.4.6 768 RAM. I was going to copy a DVD using Toast. I put in the original and as usual, the computer grabbed the files, then opened the tray and asked me to put in a blank DVD. I wasn't at the computer at the time, and by the time I was back in the office, the computer had gone to sleep, with the tray open, waiting for me to put in a blank. I touched the mouse to wake it, and nothing happened. I touched the return key, and nothing happened. I moved the mouse, tapped return repeatedly and nothing happened. After waiting a few minutes, and having no luck trying to use force quit, or anything else, I finally held the power button till it shut off. Waited a bit and went to start it again. When powered up, I got the usual happy Mac chime chord. The screen blinked grey a couple times, went to a blue screen with a flashing file folder/question mark logo. Which to me means it can't find the system or the HD. As I had it handy, I popped in Tech Tool, restarted off that CD and it could not find the hard drive either. Frustrated, went to bed. Today, I've unplugged and let it sit. Reset the PMU, zapped the pram, and started off the system install disc..that also couldn't find the HD for installing. When I opened disk Utilties it at least listed the HD as existing, but when I highlighted it and clicked on "repair" I got a message that said " Invalid B-Tree Node size. Volume Check Failed. Volume could not be repaired because of an error. And also a poop up window that said "the underlying task reported failure on exit". None of which sounded too good to me!
Any tricks left for me to try to bring this baby back to life? Note that this IS one of the models with the power supply/video issues that I have not had repaired,k as it's 200 miles to the Apple shop, and I have to bring it in, have them look at it, order the parts, wait till they get them in, fix it, then drive back to fetch it, which just hasn't been in my schedule yet.
It's like the hard drive just isn't running. I don't hear any of the drive "thinking" sounds when I try to start it up.
Is plugging in an external firewire drive and installing the system on that an idea? Something that would get me by for a while anyway? I'm getting by with my iBook, but for the wook I do, it's pretty touch on a 12" laptop! Luckily any real critical files and stuff I do have backed up on DVD, but I'd like to get 'er going!
Any ideas welcome!

Hi timinbovey
That's a temperamental Tiger is it not? I've heard hard shutdowns can cause problems, but that is pretty unforgiving.
There is little point trying to reinstall without first attempting to correct the 'Invalid B-Tree Node size' error.
So your Tech Tool pro disk was no help. Hmm.
The fastest and most expensive option would be to buy DiskWarrior which could fix the corrupt file structure on the disk.
Before that you could try and start in FireWire target disk mode where you put your iBook's HD on the eMac's Desktop, then insert the Tech Tool pro disk into the iBook and running it from the iBook's drive see if it can see the eMac's drive and perform a repair on it.
regards roam

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