What are my options when Disc Utility says my hard drive is failing?

Before I upgraded to Tiger on my G4 (this morning), I ran Disk Utility, repair permissions. After the Tiger installation, I ran Disk Utility again and got the message that my hard drive is "failing" in red letters, something I have never seen before.
I started up with the Installer Disk and tried to run Disk repair from that, but the red remains and I am prevented from doing a repair.
What are my options?
(I added this question to another thread, but got a little confused about the answered/not answered option when my message was not accepted as a "not answered." Anyway, John Huber1's response to my original question was helpful. I thought it was better to start a new thread.)
Thanks,
Jeanie
Power PC G4 Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Hey, guys.
I ran into a problem this morning that I've never ran into before and I wasn't sure where to write it but I thought this is best.
Here it goes...
Last night I had a power surge and when I restarted my computer, my external hard drive did not mount on my desktop. I than proceeded with restarting my computer, I relinked all my connections and I cant seem to get it fixed. I have a lot of material on my external drive that I dont have backed up (I know, a stupid move) anyways, I dont want to lose that information. Also, when I open up disk utility, the icon for my external drive is there and the partition I made for my external drive shows up also but the title of my partition for my external hard drive is not in bolded font. I tried to click the button to mount my external drive cause the specs tell me that it is not mounted but when I press the mount button, it does nothing. I than tried clicking the unmount button and than restart my computer and still nothing.
What problem am I facing and how can it be fixed?
Thanks.

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deborahfromwindsor wrote:
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diskwarrior manual:
To build a graph for the directory of a disk, all of the following must be true:
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install a new one and send the old one to data recovery.
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20 episodes totaling 50 hours equals about 2.5 hours per episode assuming all episodes have the same duration. Fitting 2.5 hours onto one single layer DVD would require a low bit rate which means quality wouldn't be anywhere near best, but that's a judgement call you'll have to make based on several factors. For example; if there is not much motion in the video (talking heads, etc), you can get by with a lower bit rate and may not notice any quality difference.
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The process is essentially the same as it is when authoring a regular DVD with 2 hours or less of content. However, with as many discs as you'd need to complete this "set," you'll need to create a separate DVD Studio Project for each disc. Basically, you'd use one of Compressor's DVD Presets (or customize a preset) to create an MPEG--2 video file (.m2v) and a Dolby Digital audio file (.AC3). Import both of those assets into your DVD Studio Pro project for authoring and burning.
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Size? 12cm. Capacity? Single layer, single sided DVD discs (DVD-5) have a rated capacity of 4.7Gb (4.37Gb actual), including menus. If you use single layer discs and want to keep the quality reasonably good, you'd need at least 50 discs to complete this "set" with each disc holding roughly 2 hours of footage if you keep the menu on each disc simple. Or, you could use dual-layer discs (DVD-9) which have a capacity of about 7.95Gb - almost doubling the recordable capacity. There are also dual-sided, dual-layer discs available (DVD-18) but they are relatively expensive and have to be manually turned over to continue playback ... but they do have roughly 15.9Gb capacity.
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3.5Mbps - 120 minutes
5.0Mbps -   95 minutes
6.0Mbps -   82 minutes
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8.0Mbps -   60 minutes
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What are my options when Disc Utility says my hard drive is failing?

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