Hard Drive Woes; No Boot from CD

I have a 15-inch Flat Panel iMac (800mhz) with a damaged hard drive that will not boot from any CD or DvD - Tiger, Techtools, Diskwarrior Apple Hardware Test, etc.
Techtools and AHT both freeze while booting. OSX Disks give me the "prohibited sign" then freeze after a while.
The iMac will boot from an external firewire drive. I was able to run DiskWarrior from there, and with the help of their excellent tech support, capture what could be salvaged from the internal hard drive.
My goal now is to erase the internal drive and reinstall Tiger on it. I do not know whether the internal drive is in fact failing or if some non-hardware problem caused the crash. I can afford to reinstall and use the iMac with the existing drive, risking another crash, before replacing the hard drive, because the machine is non-essential.
When I boot from the external firewire drive (Tiger) and launch Disk Utility, in the list of drives, I see only the external drive. Not the internal drive, and not the CD. I reset PRAM to no avail and then reset PMU to no avail.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Greg

Update . . . .
I was finally able to get the internal hard drive to appear in Disk Utility (by waiting a half-hour).
I partitioned and erased using the helpful procedure outlined here:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5629637#5629637
When I attempted to write zeros to the whole drive, Disk Utility froze about half way through.
I rebooted, chose initialize when the OS told me it couldn't read the drive. I'm now installing Tiger.
But I am concerned, based on the process referenced above, that the drive may have bad sectors that haven't been flagged since I couldn't go through the "zeroing out" procedure.
Should I be worried?
Thanks,
Greg

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