Os X Disaster Recovery From Powerbook, Oh help this suxors Options

[dinofond]

I have the elusive blinking folder on boot with my power book running OS X 3.9 with a question mark. I was on the road to Denver working on a track for an artist I am engineering, I had about 7 tracks going and opened up the Sampler in Logic Pro. It froze, after waiting about a half hour I shut the notebook down. When I rebooted I was in OS X hell. I need to recover this song, I am assuming it’s a bad hard drive. I know there is a way to hook a fire wire drive up and boot the machine to do a complete backup. Before I troubleshot the notebook to see if I can fix it I need to do the data recovery. Any help with the recovery and repair would be absolutely helpful.

Thanks,

-Dino