Dead iMac G5, maybe?

[equis.zero]

Ok, so, I'm getting very frustrated with my iMac (G5 w/ iSight). A while ago it was having some sleep and fan issues, but a firmware reset seemed to fix that for a while. Now it appears that the hard drive has issues. Both yesterday and today, I was getting serious beachballing for around 10-15 minutes when doing things like logging in and opening Dashboard. Today I decided to boot from the restore dvd and verify the permissions and the disk. Permissions were verified and repaired properly, however, when I verified the disk, it produced an error like invalid key length or something and told me the disk needed to be repaired. So I attempted to repair the disk, it started repairing something, but then I got an error message telling me that the disk could not be repaired. After that, the disk grayed out in Disk Utility and isn't recognized in Startup Disk. I rebooted holding option, and the drive showed up, but when I tried to boot from it, the gray logo and wheel showed up, and about 30 seconds later the system shut down. I'm starting to panic because I have alot of important data on that drive and no backups because I'm dumb. I have a copy of OS X on my iPod, I was considering booting from that and trying to backup, since it seems the hdd still mounts, but I'm not sure. Should I try that or just take it in to an Apple Store and hope that they can recover my data?

 

[nitynate]

Call apple care.



If not, take it to the apple store asap.