OS X won't boot, files disappearing

Question

Hi,
I'm running 10.3.9 on a 12in powerbook whose CD/DVD drive ceased functioning more than a year ago.
Two days ago processes began to slow down enormously and hanging. On a number of occasions I had to force restart. Last night it failed to restart. Initially the logo would appear and then the sun dial, which just rotated forever. I tried another force restart and after a few minutes there arrived a black screen, similar to terminal, with the message
:I have no name!>
I started to worry. I next connected powerbook to another mac via firewire and booted in Target mode. Although extremely slow it did allow me to open some directories, and I was able to copy some files.
I then ran disk utility which found errors and could not repair the disk, and tried disk warrior which went into hanging state.
Next I booted in safe and single-user mode: neither worked. I tried a regular boot again and ended up back at the ": I have no name!" message. At this point I ran fsck, which found "overlapped extent allocation" errors and then attempted to rebuild the catalog b tree, but failed. In its description of the system there was also the message:
"/etc/rc.boot: cannot execute binary file". At this point a standard boot would arrive at the grey page with the apple logo, but without the spinning sundial, like a tomb.
By now I was a bit pale. I launched the PB in Target mode again and it mounted, but when I tried to browse inside the directories (which was incredibly slow as if connecting to a very slow LAN) they would disappear one by one, as if selecting them was enough to kill them.
At this point I'm at a loss. Obviously the fact that the CD/VDV drive is broken isn't helping diagnostics. I haven't been able to run a hardware test or to try a reinstallation of the OS.
What I have:
My disks
A powermac
An external firewire drive
Can anyone advise me how to proceeed? I recall that command/option/shift/delete allows one to boot from another machine - but so far I haven't been able to do that (is that because of incompatability between my powermac G5 and my powerbook disks)?
My apologies for the incoherence of this post, but it's been a long night. Any help would be appreciated.
cheers,
a.
Powerbook Mac OS X (10.3.9)
Powerbook   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Good advice, colin clarke 1, but let's not think that a partition is exactly like a physical drive (I use the word physical in its real sense, not the DOS sense). If the hard drive (the actual physical drive) fails, that would mean that both partitions are also sunk. What you can recover from is corruption of the volume info of a partition and, in fact, that is a common recovery option with multi-partitions. Even if the disk utility cannot repair completely, you may be able to copy all important data of the partition to another drive or partition and erase the troubled partition. Ninety percent of the time (give or take) that will fix all data corruption issues on a partition. Brute force has its uses. I have done it a dozen times and it is a god-send.
I have also, less often, come up against corruption that is at the whole-drive layer and that cannot be fixed by erasing a single partition or even all partitions. For that nasty issue, the only resolution is success with a disk repair utility or initialize the whole drive again.
Oh, BTW, I am sure Disk Utility of OS X has an option to mark bad sectors out. The old Drive Setup program of OS 9 could do it so I can't imagine that Disk Utility would not have that option.