Thanks everyone for your answers.

I managed to solve this problem, the solution was in the outcome of mac-parted where I saw that all of the information was in /dev/hda3:
/dev/hda still doesn't have a valid partition table, but I managed to mount /dev/hda3 and get the information from that

Thank you once again for your replies, if any of you are interested I've been dealing with this bloody iBook for over 6 months (I'm not kidding, you can see some of my posts here on LinuxQuestions where I'm searching for a Live CD that works for a PPC, Gentoo 2006 seemed to be the only one that worked well since Gentoo 2007 failed for some odd reason)- I just wanted to let you know that I'm so glad this is finally over.

Now that I'm rescuing the files, any ideas what Linux OS I should install on the iBook? I've always wanted to try Arch Linux, does anyone know how Arch works on PPC?

Arch is a great distro - but I'd be willing to bet it doesn't have a ppc build.
These days builds for ppc are getting a bit thin on the ground. Search around here on LQ for recommendations - yellowdog probably.

How much are you willing to bet? A quick Google search resulted in this so there definitely is a PPC version of Arch

My only question is whether that's going to mess Arch up? I've only been using Linux for 10 months now and almost nothing but Ubuntu, I tried installing FreeBSD but I didn't use that for a long time so my problem is that since Arch is supposed to be a 'difficult' distro, whether it's going to be faar more difficult on the PPC.

I'm talking about something like "oh this dependency doesn't exist for PPC so you can't compile this program, and the sound doesn't work etc..", because I don't want to make Arch more complicated it's plenty complicated from what I've heard..