I've finally re-animated my iBook. I've given up on the idea of installing a new hard-disk for now, since there are about 40 steps you have to go through. Instead, I'm using an external FireWire brick, designed by F.A. Porsche, no less. Wooooo, fancy.
Anyway, I've managed to apply trusty DiskWarrior once again to retrieve information from the failing disk. Part of this is the PalindromeEncoding work which, if you know me and you remember, then this is part of the stuff I was wittering on about mysteriously last year. Now you know, eh? Aren't you glad.