TechTool Deluxe destroyed my Volume

Question

Hi... I stupidly used the TechTool Deluxe v 3.03 (that came with my Apple Care Plan) on my G5 Dual running Tiger 10.4.7.
Basically - I installed a Microsoft Office update last night. This morning I was greeted with a black screen over my desktop and application screen that contained the text "kernel panic".
I restarted my Mac and then ran Disk Utility to repair permissions etc.
(Obviously it wouldn't do it as it was my startup disk.)
So I started up from my G5 install disk (10.4) and tried running Disk Utility from there. It was unable to repair - stopping part way through and mentioning something about a bad or illegal "exit" or something.
Alongside the G5 install disks was the Apple Care branded TechTool Deluxe CD (v3.03). I figured - if it's good enough for Apple to be giving out with its 3 year extended warranty...
So I inserted that and ran it on my drive - which - apart from the Disk Utility 'error' - had been working fine. (I know - if it works, don't fix it, right?)
I ran the test - watched it go through the pretty icons until it got to the Volume test... 2 hours later it was stilll on task 5 of 6 and had completed 126543789 of 6457382546 tasks.
At the end of all that - it came up with a diagnosis - which was pretty similiar to all the other disk utility screens. You've got x when you should have y. This is bad. The fact that you have j when you should have p is not so bad. But you should fix this.
So I pressed the 'fix' button.
When I restarted after the TTD assault was over - I was greeted with a tiny rectangular black screen in the centre of my display and no cursor. Eventually the fan started screaming and spinning louder and harder so I shut the computer down. Nothing I could do seemed to have any effect.
That was 15 hours ago.
Since then I have started the G5 in Target Mode and tried to repair it with Disk Warrior. Disk Warrior tells me that, in essence, another utility has destroyed the volume file structure and cannot repair it. I have tried to repair it using an updated version of TTD. This seemed to fix the problem - went through the whole file thingy and a recommendation and did the repair.
To no avail.
I made a disk image from a version of TTD downloaded from Apple at https://support.apple.com/techtooldeluxe/main?id=dl and tried to start the G5 up from that and run the utility. Same thing: it ran the tests and made recommendations - which I agreed to. It made its repairs. I restarted - but nothing - just that black screen and a the threat of my tower taking off - judging by the noise the fan was making.
Now I have searched all over the web for a solution to this.
I found a thread at a macintouch forum that covered an identical issue. (http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/technicalsupportissues/topic3006.html)
One of the posters claimed to have found a magic cure for what everyone at Apple was telling him was a dead duck issue. "Dead hard drive. Sorry about the TTD thing, but we don't suggest you use it. And we knew that this problem existed. But we still gave you an ill-suited version of TTD as a 'perk'(incentive) for buying the extended warranty...
Apparently someone at Micromat had a way of fixing this problem. I quote:
"To resolve the issue I removed the Attributes file from the structure and then let the drive recreate a new Attributes file. Once a new Attributes file was created, the hard drive remounted on the desktop as expected. I did run the soon-to-be released TechTool Deluxe 3.0.4 on this hard drive afterwards and it encountered a volume bitmap issue which it was able to repair successfully."
Does anyone have any suggestions? Help? Please!
Of course - explaining how Apple can knowingly supply a defective Apple-branded tool (bearing no warnings or System Version limitations) that does exactly the OPPOSITE of what it is being used for (destroying instead of repairing) is going to be very difficult.
Right now I would love to be able to recover my life's work. Music. Photos. Writing.
Thanks!
G5 Dual 2.5GHz, 2.5 GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  
G5 Dual 2.5GHz, 2.5 GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

I was contacted by Marc Moorash from Alsoft, who guided me through the following process. (Well - at least up to Step 10 below).
The whole process probably took an hour from start to successful finish. I was on the phone to him for about 3 minutes!
1. Connected damaged G5 to Powerbook via Firewire 400 using Target Mode.
2. Launched Disk Warrior 3.03 from CD on the Powerbook
3. Selected the drive (Unknown Disk) to be repaired
4. Held down Ctrl+Opt and clicked on the DiskWarrior shield next to "Directory"
5. A hidden screen popped up asking for a password. It gave an 8 character hint:
6. The tech support asked for the hint and then supplied me the password.
7. A new menu appeared, called "Support". In that menu there was an option: "Clear Corrupted Volume Header ", which I selected.
8. I was then asked to click "Rebuild" and to call out each Step in the process to the tech support guy.
9. It almost immediately jumped to Step 5: Locating directory data.
10. Evidently this was good...as it meant that it had bypassed the error message I was getting previously.
11. Eventually DiskWarrior finished analyzing the volume and presented me with the option to preview the rebuilt volume:
12. I clicked on the "Preview" button and DW created a locked disk in the Finder.
13. I checked the volume: everything was fine.
14. I clicked on the "Replace" button.
15. My hard drive appeared on the desktop, and in the DiskWarrior menu.
16. I am now backing up all the data that I thought I had lost.
Thanks to Marc Moorash and the tech support team at Alsoft.
No thanks to AppleCare and TechTool Deluxe.