Possible bad HD

[HeidiNovice]

My system wouldn't start up and I feared the HD might be bad. While trying to pull files off using another Powerbook, it froze up and when I got everything up, my HD was no longer visible as an external drive. I booted with system CD and in Terminal, I can see some files, etc. In Disk Utility, I can see the HD but I can not see any Volumes. If the HD is still good but some directory structures are bad, how can I rebuild the dirs or try to find and save my data? I am a MAC novice but I know my way around UNIX (a little). What can I do?

 

[Satcomer]

Buy IMHO the best disk recovery on a Mac called Disk Warrior. If that can't fix a hard drive crash then it did fail. That is why geeks have screamed to their blue in the face about backing up always because all hard drive will fail eventually.

Also if you find you original install disks one of them should be labeled (in small letters) "Hardware Tests" (or something along that line. Use that to test your Mac hardware.

In the future your best bet would be an Firewire (or better) external drive you can clone to using utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper or ChronoSync.