The "infallible" backup system crashes and burns; how to transfer the data?

Question

After five years of exemplary, error-free service, my old Powerbook G4 1Ghz finally crashed during a backup to an external hard drive. I just bought a new Macbook Pro (arrived September 16th) and want to transfer the data from the old Pro to the new Pro. Herein lies the complex problem, and Migration Assistant and a firewire cable won't solve it.
When the old Pro died, I was maintaining what I believed to be an infallible backup system (ha). I did nightly backups to two different external hard drives; one was a USB LACIE drive, the other a firewire LACIE drive. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to do a merge contents backup on the USB drive and a file-level bootable clone to the firewire drive. Surely nothing could go wrong. Oh, one only needs to think of the Titanic and say, “Something did.”
The old Pro could only backup to the USB drive when using an express card that added USB 2.0 connections (the old Pros have USB 1.1 and they’re too slow). But whenever the express card was plugged into my old Pro and it fell asleep without my first powering the card off, the computer crashed. This was no problem; I just powered off the card before putting it to sleep and ignored the fact that the computer on rare occasion acted buggy with the USB express card plugged in. Well, on the fateful night in question, the computer did its backup to the USB drive and then fell asleep while it was still plugged in (this is what its energy saver told it to do, unfortunately). When I tried to turn the computer back on, a black box appeared in the upper left hand corner with a bunch of random-seeming white text and the concluding message, “Waiting for remote debugger.” The computer was frozen and a cold reboot was the only option.
My old Pro would never be the same again.
I tried to boot it up. Sometimes it did so, but then would suddenly show a red screen and crash. It kept crashing, sometimes just powering off immediately. So I brought out good old Disk Warrior, booted up with that, repaired permissions, repaired disk, and rebuilt the directory. I also booted up with the Tiger OS X install CD and fixed permissions that way just for good measure. The computer then started up fine. I thought I was back to normal! Celebration time! Not. The USB drive that I had backed up to would not mount anymore. So I, seeing that the computer appeared to be back to normal, just plugged in second external hard drive--the firewire--and began the bootable clone. It delved into making the clone without a hitch and I went off to work happy and content that I would have an up-to-date backup soon.
Lo and behold, when I came back from work, the backup to the firewire drive hung midway through. It had done nothing but wiped the entire drive and copied about 500 mb of data to it before freezing. I tried again several times and, believe it or not, only got vastly improved results when the offending express card was actually plugged into the computer. By this mysterious and probably risky method, I was able to get some data off. But only about 1/10 of the whole. The old Pro always would crash before more than 5 gigs of data or so can be transferred.
Starting from around that time, the offending old Pro began to exhibit hideous popping, gurgling, grating, clicking, swiping, and other sounds from the left hand side of the computer—where I imagine the hard drive is. These sounds can be quite loud and sometimes even sound like tempered UFO tones beamed down to the computer. Sometimes they aren’t present at all and the computer acts fine, until a certain file or folder is accessed, and then they start again and the computer hangs, going from fine to disastrous in an instant.
I took out the offending express card and launched it away and took the USB drive and put it on another computer. It still would not mount. I finally got it to unlock (it’s a fingerprint-access safe drive) and ran Disk Warrior on it and was able to get as much data off it as I could. But it appears that a huge chunk of data was simply missing from the drive, whether from Disk Warrior having to delete data when it rebuilt the directory or from damage when the computer died while backing up to this drive, I don’t know.
So now I went from a supposedly infallible backup system of two rotating external hard drives to potentially losing 5 years of utterly critical work!
I tried starting up the old Pro in target disk mode with my new Pro. At first, this appeared to have very promising results because there was no grating or popping sounds from my old Pro when I did this. I began a data transfer with glee. But no luck; the old Pro always eventually hangs and the new Pro doesn’t even recognize it (the icon for the old Pro disappears as if I unmounted it).
Sometimes the Old Pro can still boot up and seem to act fine; it can sit like that indefinitely, I'd guess; but if the disk is actually read and written to enough, it always fails. I am using it as little as possible now (i.e. not at all) so as not to exacerbate the problem any more than it already has been.
Two quick notes that might further explain the situation: two weeks before the crash happened, I used iDefrag to defragment the drive. The night before the crash happened, I did a lot of work on my computer while on a bumpy trip on the Long Island Railroad. The computer acted fine throughout all this, but perhaps the bumpiness or the defragmentation contributed to this problem.
I must get the data off. This dead/dying hard drive doesn’t just contain mere photos and music libraries and nifty applications. I’m talking completed and incomplete novel manuscripts, lecture notes, lesson plans, published and to-be-published articles, a massive thesis, and much more totaling literally thousands upon thousands of pages and representing more than 5 years of graduate and professional research and work. For me, the stakes are critically high. Thank you for reading this Hero's Journey of a post.

Answer 1

Good news!
Imagine a Venn diagram with four interlapping circles. The circles are:
1. Catastrophically exploded hard drive
2. Catastrophically annihilated external hard drive used for incremental backups
3. Catastrophically wiped cleaned external hard drive used for bootable clones
4. Email, CD, and iPod backups
With a little shake, rattle and roll and other craziness you do with a hard drive with failed bearings, I got #1 working briefly, thank goodness.
With Disk Warrior and figuring out how to surpass a fingerprint-activated security feature, I got #2 working in a limited fashion.
With some workarounds, I got some use out of #3.
#4 just is.
The interlap of these 4 things produced about 95-99% or so of my data, including all critical items. It was a disorganized mess I just spent two days organizing, but I am back up and running without having to use expensive data backup services. I am slightly bothered by that slight bit of missing data, but from what I can tell, it amounts to nothing more than a brief sketch of a lesson plan, a song or two from the iTunes store, and maybe a handful of attachments. Nothing to spend big bucks recovering, in other words.
Now I will substitute my "infallible" backup system with a new one:
1. Time capsule/time machine
2. Complete online backups with Mozy
3. Occasional bootable clones to the external hard drive I have that didn't get damaged.
I think this will be the ticket!
Thank you all.