Whirring hard drive and beach ball timer

Hey guys
This problem is in a G5 iMac (without iSight) with an airport extreme card and a 80gig hard drive and super drive. It is not an intel based one as is over a year old and no warrenty left.
This fault is intermittent and sometimes everything works fine.
The other day it took litterally 15 minutes to load and then every time I asked it to do something like move the cursor it would hang and freeze.
So I booted from the install disks and ran a repair disk permissions then repair disk on the booting hard drive (an 80 gig one).
It had hundreds of disk permissions to repair then I got this message when running the disk repair.
===
Invalid Keylength
Volume check Failed
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)
Repair Attempt on 1 volume
0 HFS volumes repaired
1 volume could not be repaired
===
I ran this through the support section on this site and it said this was rare and I should erase and format the hard disk whilst booting from the install disk (which I did). Then installed the operating system again and everything was fine. Installed all the updates through software update adn it rebooted and everything was golden - started putting my images and files back on and still fine. Following day - same problems again!
Hard Drive sounds like it is searching the entire disk for a piece of information that aint there. System hangs and the beach ball comes up. This can happen when just moving the cursor before I even open any software.
Any suggestions?
Any advice?
Is the Hard Drive just knackered?
All help greatly appreciated.

"OK I have got disk warrior and used this and it says the SMART disk systems says the disk is running correctly and there are no errors on the disk."
Hopefully, you ran DW from the CD.
If DW reported no errors and/or repaired none, then I would run the Tiger DVD test again to see if it reports the same errors again! I am concerned about the one it could not repair initially:
Volume check Failed
DW should have seen & repaired the above!

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MacConvert54 wrote:
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