White Screen With Folder Question Mark At Startup

Last night I was downloading some pictures and posting a status on facebook. Firefox locked up so I forced quit it. When I tried to reopen it the icon in the dock would bounce a couple of times but not open. I went ahead and used Safari, finished what I was doing and went to bed. When I woke up the screen was black. I tried to wake it but to no avail. I shut it down by holding power button down and restarted. When it came on it dinged and a white screen came up but no apple icon or spinning circle. After a few minutes a folder popped up with a ? in it. I booted from my DVD and ran disk utility. The hard drive shows up but the partition underneath now says disk0s2 rather than untitled. When I try to repair it I get an error:
Verify and Repair volume "disk0s2"
Catalog file entry not found for extent.
The volume could not be verified completely.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
I am going to try and connect it to my mini via firewire to see if I can copy some files. My questions are (1) What do you recommend I do? (2) When it tells me to back up as many files as I can, what does that mean? How do I do this? Can this be done from Disk Utilities?
Thanks for your help.
Danny

(1) What do you recommend I do?
You could try repairing it with [DiskWarrior|http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html] or [TechTool Pro|http://www.micromat.com>. Either of those will cost money, but if you don't have a backup, that's your best shot at getting your data back. If repair fails, you have two options: 1) reformat the hard drive with Disk Utility or 2) replace it. If #1 doesn't work, #2 becomes your only option. If you have data that wasn't backed up, you'll need a file recovery tool like [Data Rescue|http://www.prosofteng.com>, [File Salvage|http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1] or Stellar Phoenix. None of those will guarantee success, and I suspect you won't get back anything close to all your data.
(2) When it tells me to back up as many files as I can, what does that mean?
Just what it says, but the how is your choice. Disk Utility can do backups from the Restore tab, but I suspect that won't work with such a badly-damaged disk. Connecting to another machine via Firewire is a good idea, but may not work if the disk is too badly damaged to mount, which I suspect might be the case since Disk Utility doesn't show you the normal volume name. First step would be to repair if you can't access the drive.
Ultimately, from the sounds of it, your drive may be too badly damaged to recover much, or any, data from it. In which case, you will have learned a hard lesson on the necessity of backups.

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