severely damaged directory

My mom was having some problems with her iMac G5, so I ran Disk Warrior for her and got the message the directory cannot be repaired because it is too severely damaged.

I am trying to think of the best and most convenient way to save her data and hope some of you can give me some good advice.

What I was thinking of doing is using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy her drive to an external HD; then copying the system back to the iMac. But I have never done this before so I have a couple of questions.

First, she is only using about 30GB of her 150GB drive. To make a bootable copy of the drive using CCC, do we need to get a drive matching the size of the drive in the iMac (150) or can we just get a drive big enough to hold all data written to the disk?

Second, once I have copied the iMac drive to the external drive, how do I get the cloned drive back to the iMac drive? I am a little stumped on this. Will I be able to boot from the external drive, then erase the iMac internal drive, and then copy the clone from the external drive back?

Thanks a lot for your assistance!

I've always been leery of Disc Warrior. Did you boot from the System discs and run Disc Utility first?

You don't need to have the drive sizes match for CCC. You should be able to boot from the external drive, as long as it is a Firewire drive. I don't think you can boot from external USB 2 drives but I could be wrong. Also, when making the copy with CCC, make sure you have the "Make Bootable copy" box checked.

Yes, tried running Disk Utility from system disc.

Get the messages:

Reserved fields in the catalog have incorrect data

and

Invalid tree leaf count

And the final outcome is:

1 HFS volume repaired
1 volume could not be repaired


...

I just read about another drive cloning utility called SuperDuper. Does anybody happen to know if this is more reliable than Carbon Copy Cloner, or does it not really matter to much which one I use?