BootcacheControl.playlist not found, MacBook does not boot anymore

Booting a MacBook with Snow Leopard installed will suddenly stop with the message:

Unable to open /var/db/BootCache.playlist: 2 No such file or directory

Booting in single-user mode, I can see that the file exists, readable by the owner only.

I booted the MacBook in Target Disk Mode and created an image of the hard disk to save my data. Image creation succeeded without any errors and fsck & fsck_hfs do not throw any errors either.

I tried reinstalling Snow Leopard, but that results in "Unable to install Mac OS X", or something like that, with the opportunity to reboot only (which results in the initial aforementioned case). Disk Utility permissions verification shows a lot of entries, but isn't able to repair those. Verify Disk shows no errors.

Using Disk Utility to try to erase the HD also leads to an error message that the disk can't be formatted.

It looks like the disk crashed, or is this the wrong diagnosis? Is there any possibility to check the disk other than fsck or Disk Utility? What else can I do to try to save the system and disk?