DiskWarrior

I ordered the newest Diskwarrior and it arrived today. I'll make an attempt. ...

Call or email them. See if they can help you get it to mount. If you can get it to mount, then run DiskWarrior on it. ...

I would go first to a disk recovery tool such as DiskWarrior, TechTool Deluxe (comes with Applecare) or Pro, etc. I don't even use Disk Utility anymore. I don't trust it to repair because sometimes it can make things worse. Bot

As above, and DiskWarrior has a way of fixing things that other programs do not fix. ...

Sounds like you need a good directory structure utility. Get a hold of a copy of Diskwarrior. It should fix it up for you. Even if it cant after rebuilding the directory it will mount a preview image where you can copy all your files from there.

Shut down the computer and disconnect the drive. Then Reset Your PRAM before plugging the drive back it. Then plug the drive back in and consider getting an excellent drive utility called Disk Warrior to try to fix drive issues. This IMHO is the best drive utility on the Mac platform. Now the free Unix built in drive requires some knowledge or guts on the Single-User mode...

There are a couple of things you can try to do. Since you have a Data Rescue program, I would suggest reading up on it NOW. I would get the external drive, boot off your Installation Disk and then use that to install an OS on your new EX-HD. Then boot on that and see if you can access data in your failing drive. If you can--copy. Or you can use a copying program like...

1. Apple Care is generally useless in that fashion. 2. M$ has, apparently, a problem with fonts. After searching online, one site recommended opening Font Book and discarding any "bad" fonts. This I did . . . voila!. Also make sure you have the latest update of, I assume, Office 2008. But this does not help you! I HOPE you back your data up to an Ex-HD. If you do not...

Depends on which version of DiskWarrior you are using--there is a new one available. Be that as it may have you tried booting from the system disk via your other computer to you sick one? --J.D.

Thanks Natobasso, My optical drive is kaput, but I ran DiskWarrior last night (via firewire from my MacBook) to repair permissions but was not able to get past the blue screen afterwards. I have my bootable backup on my external drive (via SuperDuper) and hope that it can make a reinstall easier (if needed).