RE: Drive doesn't boot after 10.5.8 upgrade

Question

After upgrading to 10.5.8, it was a struggle to shut down my machine, especially after typing in Firefox caused it to lock up. When I decided it would be best to restart the machine and start fresh, the screen stayed gray, without the apple on bootup. After a few reboots, I had the computer boot to one of my FireWire drives. Initially, the internal ATA drive didn't show up at all in either DiskUtility or DiskWarrior. After a few hours, the drive began to show up in DiskUtility, with the brand name of the drive listed, but no down arrow with the name I gave the drive. It also doesn't allow me to select any of the buttons for verify/repair disk permissions or verify/repair disk, as they are greyed out. There is no change with DiskWarrior, as it doesn't show me the drive in the pull down menu. And in TechTool Pro, it shows the drive off to the side as disk4s, but doesn't allow me to mount the drive.
Any solutions to get my drive back up and running, and to archive files/programs onto a backup drive?

Answer 1

Update:
After coming to the realization that no software was going to get me up and running with the drive, after testing the Seagate I drive on another G4, and getting similar, if not worse results on that one (as I couldn't even get it to be listed in the DiskUtility window that I had previously, even though I couldn't verify/repair disk on my computer either) — I took the mindset that by partitioning the drive — if it still was a kosher drive — that I could then take it to a data recovery place as a last resort.
I had planned on taking the drive for data recovery to a place near my home, but of course they closed up shop after more than a decade in the community just last month. Being antsy and wanting some resolution, upon reading that by partitioning a drive, it would not zero out my data, made it sound that it should be an easy recovery, and at least start the process.
Then again, I was wondering if there was some software that I could get to be able to do that myself, or some method so I don't have to fork over $$$$ if it's an easy thing to do myself? After reading up on partitioning, it indicated that I wasn't deleting anything, and that it was in essence re-jigging my drive. So I took my 75GB drive, and split it 15GB/60GB. In an blink I had two drives that I could access once again. I ran the verify/repair options, with no errors coming up. From there, I then began to reinstall OSX 10.5 on one partition, but stopped immediately, knowing that having the OS wasn't necessary at this point, as I still have an outboard FireWire drive to boot to.
I then rebooted the machine to that FireWire drive, and to my sadness, while the two partitions appeared on the desktop, one was a completely empty partition (60GB) and one with just 64K (15GB).
I knew it wouldn't be that easy.
Having already scoured Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and found nothing to recover the data, and used the Data Recovery "tool" in TechTool Pro 5, with it only bringing up about 30 System files at the most based on a single search for one letter in the alphabet, I'm all ears at this point at what I can do possibly on my end.
At least I know that the drive is in working order, despite the few people I talked to who tried to tell me that the drive just suddenly breathed it's last breath, and would never work again. The 10.5.8 update has something to do with why the drive fried, and there doesn't seem to be anything physically wrong with the drive.
Thanks in advance.