Hard drive "I/O Error" - is disk dead?

I have a PB G4 15" 1.25 GHz (FW 800) 1GB ram. My 80GB Hitachi hard drive suuposedly died on me a few weeks ago. I have booted up on the leopard start up disk to try disk utility, and booted into single user mode, and used fsck -f. Both processes returned similar errors - "incorrect block count for file 1f5_data", and "volume header needs minor repair". After about thirty seconds to one minute of trying to repair the disk it said "I/O error", and appears to try and repair again, but repeats the I/O error again and again, eventually becoming unusable.
I have a copy of disk warrior, and an external HD. I loaded leopard onto the external, and used DiskWarrior to rebuild the bad (Tiger) drive. Diskwarrior was able to rebuild the drive and give me a preview disk which allowed me to recover all of my data and copy it to the external drive. At this point I was ready to reformat the bad drive and start over, and here is where my problem is. I cannot format/repair/do anything to my PB HD except for rebuild it with DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior cannot replace the directly after it has rebuilt it either.
Does this mean my hard-drive is crashed/dead/unusable? The hard drive obviously still works in some capacity, but why cannot I not reformat it without this input/output error? What can I do to get my HD back to working condition? Thanks for any help.

Hi, allen8u, and welcome to Apple Discussions. Yes, it does sound as though your drive has failed. Apparently its read/write head(s) can read but not write data. I would replace the drive, since it will be hard to have much faith in it even if it does begin working properly again.

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Then consider a later version OS X -- whatever most recent version that model can support... {edited}
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