My hard drive crashed while backing up!

How's this for luck: I finally bought an external drive and was in the process of making a bootable backup to a Maxtor One Touch Firewire 800 drive when my G5's internal drive crashed! I was able to insert the OSX startup disc which opens the installer, and then allows me to open Disk Utility. After several seconds of gathering disk information, I finally get two hard drive icons on the left side of the window. The top one gives me generic info about the drive (74.5GB and the model number). Under that is another hard drive icon followed by "Disk1s9", and that is greyed out. (I do not see the actual name that I gave the drive.) When I select it, Disk Utility tells me that the drive is not mounted, and the 'mount' button on the toolbar becomes active.
I placed a call to Apple Care. He had me unplug and then replug the drive. After that my drive was named Disk0s9 in Disk Utility, but was still not mounted. They told me I needed to go to a repair center. The tech at the Genius Bar of a local Apple Store used one of their drives to try to run Disk Warrior on my drive. At one point I saw my name for the drive on the screen, but Disk Warrior did not seem to start when prompted, and I was told that I was in possession of a dead drive and given the business card for a data recovery service.
Of course, I would like to save the contents of my drive. I'm just wondering if there is anything that I can try before shelling out for data recovery? I'm assuming that clicking the 'mount' button in Disk Utility is not the answer or the people at Apple would have suggested it? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
Next time I'm going to back up individual files first and worry about bootable copies later.

You are going to need another SATA drive anyway at this point. And surprised you went this long probably on just one?
Install 10.4.6 on the new drive (assuming you don't want to install on the Maxtor) - later versions of Tiger have improved on Disk Utility than what 10.4.0 had. Apple sells 10.4.6 DVDs now also.
DW can take a long time. But it is possible it is salvageable. Even put SATA drive in a universal SATA/FW case and deal with it there.
DiskJockey and Data Rescue are two good options. Disk Utility can also has a Restore tab to allow copying one drive to another. A sector copy might be of use, too.
TechTool Pro (4.1.2) might even be of help (DW has not been updated and there IS a need for it, but it has been over a year they've been working on that update).
People have even put hard drives in the freezer (sealed and moisture proof) to get access to a drive.
Heat kills drives. And it could be your system and the drive got too warm.

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