LR2 Experienced System Crash & Corrupted Catalog - Need Help!!!

Question

We are using:  Mac OS X Version 10.5.8
Background on Lightroom Use: 
The size of the catalog in question is 296 MB.
Pictures on an 8GB smart card were being uploaded into lightroom and simultaneously moved into a folder on an external hard drive at the time of the crash. (During this download, the imac screen gave us a very scary...."Death Veil"  that started at the top and slowly covered in a downward motion the entire screen, freezing up the computer completely.)
The error message said we needed to restart the computer using the restart option or shut the computer down using the on/off switch. 
Since the computer was "frozen"  we were unable to access the restart option so we hit the off switch, holding it down until the imac shut itself down.
After waiting for approximately  a minute, we restarted the imac.
The imac started as it usually does,  however, when we opened Lightroom2, the following message appeared:
After Selecting the "Repair Catalog"  Option the following message appeared:
Other catalogs are operating properly in LIghtroom.
We have no available backup and are looking for someone who can assist with
perhaps fixing the corrupted catalog. (Literally, thousands of hours)
Mahalo Nui Lo

Answer 1

If you ever ran "Save" on a lot of images, you'll have all your edits and metadata for those images, and if you ran save recently on the whole catalog of images, you'll be pretty well off. In such a case, I'd start a brand new catalog, and Import in place all the images.
However, assuming the worst, that the above avenue won't yield much, one particular Adobe employee, Dan Tull, is a whiz at repairing catalogs, and you may get it done by sending the catalog to him. From a post long ago: Dan Tull can be contacted at dtull-at-adobe.com .. .. note that @ has been substitued with -at- in above email address .. I haven't seen Dan in this forum for a while, so it's not a for sure thing.
With best wishes,