Hard Drive failure.. .heart attacks definitely on the horizon

Hi everyone,
I'm hoping someone out there with experience can lend a hand.
I have a Powerbook 15 bought in January 04. Over the past few days it had been making strange sounds and freezing up occasionally. I turned it on this morning..and it apparently decided to die. Screen was grey with a folder that looked like an icon from OS 9. strange. I have apple care, called up a tech person, went through disk utility/hardware tests (extended) and it seems all passed. but..on the left hand side where it lists your DVD player and your hard drive, the icon wasn't called 'hard drive' but 'disk OS9'.
The technician wanted to do a restore I think, but I was concerned about wiping out everything on my drive and stopped him (last backup was a month ago through iMac) and I'm definitely freaking out about losing all of my music, photos, data, etc. I'm in the UK, am a doctoral student, and my apple center here can't even look at my computer for another 2 weeks. Will try london apple store to see if there's a faster way around.
My question is this: is there anything I can do to try and recover data from my computer? apple store people apparently don't do this when fixing/replacing the hard drive and i'm ignorant about what's involved with this and how much these things cost.
I know these things happen with any electronics, bad luck happens to people regardless if they're pc/mac owners...but i wistfully thought macs were immune to this type of thing.
Apologies for the long response, and many thanks in advance for any help!
PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

If you have another Mac, you can use FireWire Target Disk Mode to mount your computer's hard drive on the other Mac, and copy your data off:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

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http://prodesigntools.com/photoshop-elements-12-direct-download-links-premiere.html
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Hard Drive failure.. .heart attacks definitely on the horizon

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