How I "recovered" my internal HD on Intel Imac

So I've been plugging away for a straight 20 hours on trying to recover / repair my internal HD on my Intel Imac and all the suggested utilities / methods I found on the internet / apple discussions were not working: TechTool, Diskwarrior, Data Rescue, SuperDuper, DiskDrill, and even TestDisk. I had been working on it using the Imac in Target Mode via Firewire. Occasionally in terminal I would see the partion (always saw the disk), see files, etc. But I could never mount the drive or get any of the utilities to recover files or rebuild the volume.
I was losing a lot of hope of getting anything back but my last idea to work the machine worked to get all my files back. Here is what I did:
Inserted the OS X installer DVD into the "dead drive" iMac, set it as startup disk, attached a 1TB USB drive and started up from the CD.
I then installed the OS onto the USB drive attached to said "dead" iMac. Restarted iMac with USB drive attached, held down OPTION to select the external USB to start from and went thru the apple 'welcome' screens etc. Then, when the first time startup install asked if I wanted to migrate files/apps to the new OS, I selected each of the items there. Each category showed up correctly and calculated file sizes correctly. Clicked next and the assistant began copying all the files to the new drive.
So I'm sure this won't necessarily work for everyone as it would depend on the type of failure you had, but it is one which I did not come across anywhere (and I searched hours online for ideas) but if it at least works for 1 other person out there with a Mac in distress, my sharing was worth the time!
And for the back story as to how my drive failed, I was in Firefox and suddently the dreaded beachball showed up. It stayed there spinning and unresponsive for nearly 20 minutes. Could not force quite, cancel, etc. I did the dreaded hard restart via the power on button and that was the beginning of the end.
Upon next restart, I had the grey screen for a while then the CPU shut down automatically. Immediately got into Single User mode and tried to fsck via command line and it would not work and so on down the line with all the above mentioned utilities.
Hopefully this may help someone at some point!

Have you noticed this forum is all about workstations? doesn't hurt or matter just might want to check Mac OS and iMac Communities.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os?view=discussions

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