Macbook pro won't boot, Disk utility input/output error

Hi

I turned on my macbook pro yesterday to discover that it wouldn't boot past the grey screen with the apple logo.

I understand that i can re-install from the install dvd but obviously need to get a back-up of my drive before i do so. (i know, im an idiot for not backing up!! 😟)

There are no peripheral devices and network cables connected.

Safe boot wont work.

Tryed resetting the NVRAM / PRAM.

Connecting my external hardrive and using the install DVD to access disk utility to do a back-up and restore my files hasn't worked. I firstly had to re-formatted the external hardrive to 'mac-os extended journaled' as trying to save an image of the Machintosh HD resulted in an error msg saying 'not enough' free space.

Once formatted and with 1TB free space another attempt at saving the drive as an image to my external drive resulted in an error messgae after 10 mins saying 'Input/output error. This keeps happening.

I've also tried to 'verfify disk' on both external and enternal drives and all is coming back fine.

Is there anything else i can do to retrive the contents of my macbook? The information on there is extremely important to me and i'm gutted and worn out at this point. I'm tempted to bring it for a repair at my local mac shop but worried it will cost a fortune.

Also it mite be worth mentioning that a few weeks ago i got a message saying 'start-up disk almost full' so i began clearing about 20 gig from my HD. Didn't recieve that message again. At the current time there is 6 gig free.

Also the day before this problem began, the music making software i use gave a warning saying something along the lines of 'Cannot reload from save undo history'. This program crashes on me quite frequently but always returns to where it was when it crashed after i reopen the project, but it was now saying it could no longer do that. Alarm bells were obviously ringing but i didnt have time to investigate at that time. Full of regret now!!

Any help on the matter is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

R