Internal Hard Drive Won't Boot or Mount

I don't know if this is the right forum for this but...
My 24" iMac running 10.5.2 won't start up. Meaning I can't get past the grey screen. I fsck the disk in single user mode and got back "invalid nobe structure (4,19621)" and repairs failed, then quickly shut down. As I understand it the (4,19621) means that the file with catalog node ID 19621 in the Catalog B-Tree portion of the disk directory has an invalid extent entry. I might be wrong here. If any knows how to correct that problem that would be helpful. But thats not the real problem.

I should add I tried to boot from the install DVD and repair the disk with disk utility and it would not repair the disk either.

Disk Utility recognizes the disk as "232.9 GB AAPL Firewire Target Media" and thats all while in target disk mode.

The real problem is the disk won't mount in firewire target disk mode. I would like to try to recover some of the fills that I haven't backed up mainly in my documents folder or repair this problem.

I am going to install (well not me) a new hard drive Monday and have a fresh and new system but in the mean time I would like to try to recover some of my files if possible.

I should add the one time it did mount, all the folders were there but none of the files. And it gave no worrying. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status and the start up volume yesterday and got the report the disks seems to be okay.

Any help in getting the disk to mount in firewire target disk mode to repair and/or recover some files would help.

Message was edited by: windylove