[G4] Something bad happened

[Gregory Cortelyou]

Early this morning I was using my G4 as usual, checking mail, reading  
newspapers online, etc. and it was fine. I left home for a few hours  
with the computer on which is not unusual and when I came back  
something was different. I tried to open a document and nothing  
happened, I mean nothing. The mouse cursor would move but would not  
do anything. The hard drive was not spinning. Did a hard restart and  
nothing, flashing question mark. Booted up with Tiger DVD and it did  
not see my hard drive. Shut down properly from the DVD and tried to  
reboot to the HD and it did work, it did spin up, and I could use  
things for a minute so I rebooted to the DVD and ran disk utility to  
repair. It said it could not repair the drive's damage. Said I have  
"invalid sibling link". I have the OS 9 version of Disk Warrior but  
it could not make the repair. Said the disk is too severely damaged.  
Should I purchase the latest version and see if that will do it? I  
hate to say it but my most recent backups do not have many important  
pictures, etc. I will do what I can to get it back. I was trying to  
do a big backup yesterday but for some reason after 30 minutes it did  
not complete. My backup DVD was blank. Any suggestions appreciated.
Thanks,
Greg