Will your mac not power up or can it just not completely boot? If it can power up and you can get the optical drive tray open, put the Tiger installation DVD in there and boot from it (power up holding down the "C" key). Run DiskUtility once you have access to the menu bar at the top of the screen. If the HD is recognized, click repair disk and hopefully that will do it. I haven't read anything about this on Macfixit, and things normally turn up there. If the disk won't mount and isn't recognized by DiskUtility, I will personally send you a copy of Prosoft's Data Rescue II. It's an emergency boot disc/data recovery program. It saved my ass a few months ago and is awesome. I'll do anything I can to keep RTJ going. Needless to say, I'm now religious about my backups. I have an external firewire drive that I clone my internal drive to once a week with the free CarbonCopyCloner. If your internal drive is toast, you'll need an external drive to recover to. Let me know. THIS SUCKS!!!
Will your mac not power up or can it just not completely boot? If it can power up and you can get the optical drive tray open, put the Tiger installation DVD in there and boot from it (power up holding down the "C" key). Run DiskUtility once you have access to the menu bar at the top of the screen. If the HD is recognized, click repair disk and hopefully that will do it. I haven't read anything about this on Macfixit, and things normally turn up there. If the disk won't mount and isn't recognized by DiskUtility, I will personally send you a copy of Prosoft's Data Rescue II. It's an emergency boot disc/data recovery program. It saved my ass a few months ago and is awesome. I'll do anything I can to keep RTJ going. Needless to say, I'm now religious about my backups. I have an external firewire drive that I clone my internal drive to once a week with the free CarbonCopyCloner. If your internal drive is toast, you'll need an external drive to recover to. Let me know. THIS SUCKS!!!