Computer woes: One step closer to complete failure

Well, the internal hard drive seems to be hosed. The directory seems to be damaged, and when I tried to fix it, the software kicked out a "can not retrieve directory due to drive malfunction" error. When trying to reboot, the computer gets as far as the "Starting OS X" screen, the progress bar fills...then hangs.

Fortunately for me, I installed a copy of OS X on my shiny new external drive, and this computer is old enough to still have the ability to boot from an external FireWire device.

Oddly, the computer works better than it has in a while...but I doubt this is a viable long term solution.

Oh boy...