MacBook No Longer Starts

This is going to be a long one, so please bear with me.
I have a macbook, an original one (purchased May 2006), and have had many problems (hardware and software). My latest problem started when I put on the OSX.4.10 update. After the update it will no longer start ... it just hangs at the white apple screen (I've left it on for over 20 minutes).
As I've said, I've had many previous problems so I decide to just reimage OSX. I have another mac and connect it via target disk mode, but some directories take a long time to list, and sometimes completely hangs the host computer. Each target disk mode restart allows me to access different folders, so once I finally get my stuff backed up, I stick in the install disk.
The install disk starts fine but when it gets to the point of which destination to install, nothing is listed. So I open disk utility and run verify disk it says "invalid node structure" and "the volume needs to be repaired", but it also presents a modal dialog that says "first aid failed" and "the underlying task reported failure on exit". When I proceed and run repair disk it gives the same error.
So I read around and learn about fsck so I start the terminal, run the fsck as described here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
It doesn't do anything ... as if I just pressed enter at the prompt, it immediately returns. I just restate that at this point am at the main OSX install and using the utilities. The hard disk will not mount at all.
So what is going on? Is my disk dead and it is just a coincidence it happened after the update? What are my options?
And I should mention that I'm a software engineer and although it is certainly possible I missed something obvious, I've been repairing computers for many years.
Thanks for reading!

If you are logging into this drive as an external hard drive (which you are when you connect it via firewire to another computer) and you cannot pull up things like the directory listing then it is hardware because you are using a working OS on the second computer and just trying to read the bits of data. The data is corrupt and majority of times it is corrupt due to hardware and not software.
marcos

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