Can't boot from firewire disk

[rzieske]

I know this is a little off topic, but I'm not having any success on the Apple forums. The internal drive on my G5 iMac maybe dead or dying. 3 nights ago apps like PathFinder and Finder windows started to hang. I rebooted a couple times, but the system got very sluggish. I quickly dragged changed data to a FW drive. Then the session hung and the machine would not boot. I booted off of my SuperDuper! FW copy from last weekend and grabbed more data until it hung accessing that drive. I started Disk Utility and got the usual failure when trying to rebiuld the B-tree. From that point I could no longer see the internal drive. That's a great app....

I booted from the Tiger DVD but could no longer mount the internal drive. Tried to boot from the FW drive again and now I can no longer boot from FW either. Nice. Never had that happen before. I know that copy is still bootable as I have two FW drives that I rotate SuperDuper! backups to, neither will boot the iMac, but I can boot my Powerbook from them.

So: I cannot boot from internal as it can't find a system. I cannot boot from bootable FW. When I boot from Tiger DVD the installer cannot find the internal drive to install on it. Disk Utility can find the drive but (as usual) can't repair it (surprise). I let Disk Warrior run for about 24 hrs but always get sick of it and cancel. DW also says that S.M.A.R.T. says hardware is ok...

2 questions: Is it likely my internal drive is dead? Does anyone know why I can no longer boot from the FW drives?

thanks for any thoughts