loads to a screen with a question mark:

[professrmixtape]

i have a powerbook g4.

i accidentally stepped on my laptop, mostly on the left-hand corner. i didn't put all of my weight on it (and i'm not heavy) and the computer seemed fine after it happened. later on, firefox froze and then the rest of my system became frozen as well. my mouse worked, but i couldn't click on anything.

i shut it down and upon start up, it loaded to a screen with the mac face on it and a blinking question mark. i tried holding down apple +s, nothing happened. i did press down the alt key but the screen just showed two arrows, nothing else...

haven't tried the start up disk yet. i don't have mine anymore. is there something i can do, or did i really break my hard drive?

and if i did break my hard drive, is there any way to recover data from a hard drive that was stepped on?