Retrieving data from a damaged hard drive

The catalog tree on my PowerBook has become corrupted, and the computer won't boot. It will boot from the installation disk or the TechTools disk, but it appears the corruption is irreparable. I'll have to just restore the drive. At this point, I'm just trying to get my photos and music and whatever else I can scavenge off the drive. I have an external hard drive I could move stuff to, but no way of viewing the contents of the damaged drive. My question: is it possible to view the contents of the drive even though it won't boot? How can I retrieve my files before I reformat the drive?
Thanks,
Don

DiskWarrior is the best there is to "fix" various types of directory and corruption problems. In most cases, if DW can't fix it, nothing can. Disk Utility is great at finding problems, but can't fix all of them. Every Mac user should have a copy of DW.
Be sure to get DW on a CD, since that's what you boot from to fix the problem on your hard drive. You can download DW, but you have to burn it to a CD or put it on another bootable volume.
 Cheers, Tom

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