Hi, I need some help/advice from you guys, here's my horror story:

Two days ago I was using my iBook listening to music in iTunes and browsing iPhoto, all of a sudden the computer stopped reacting it was completely frozen, and after several minutes I was forced to do a hard shut down by pressing the power button. Next day I'm using it again this time listening to an mp3 in Quicktime and again same type of hard crash. Today I tried booting up with no luck: I get the apple logo and the spinning thingie on the bottom but it stays there forever, not even reaching the login screen. I thought "oh well time to check apple's support online", so I followed all the instructions and troubleshoooting guides and still I can't use it.

I tried:

-booting into Safe Mode (it didn't work, the computer just stayed at the boot screen with the apple logo and not even the spinning progress circle showed up)
-tried Single User mode (it loaded and I got some text but it froze there so I couldn't type anything to check my disk)
-resetting the PMU (did nothing)
-resetting PRAM (did nothing)
-booting up from OS X install disc to run disk repair (it ran the program but it stayed there forever trying to 'find disks')

So my conclusion is my hard drive is dead, it even makes a slight clicking noise like it tries to read information...

Does this mean that all my data is gone forever? I have several gigs of music, personal photos and videos that don't have backup, I'm VERY worried. I also saw there's an iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program that seems to affect my model but it just says something about distorted displays but nothing about hard drive failure does anyone know if it might cover this?

Thanks for the help! I will take my iBook tomorrow to the local apple repair center and see what happens...

Also do you think I will be able to recover my data (without paying thousands and thousands of dollars)?

shit---try to target disk that bitch from another computer...the apple dudes will try that. may that force be with you.

i am buying an external drive tommorrow!

BTW I also ran the Hardware Test and it said everything was OK...

hardware tests aren't always accurate, they usually check stuff like fans, temps, mobo settings, ram but not always detailed. (don't know bout apple though) About the clicking, does it happen constantly, or does it happen when you try to read something? If it only clicks while trying to access data it's gonna be easier to recover data using software methods from my experience. If it makes a continous clicking or grinding, it will be much harder/expensive to recover data or if you have a head crash (where the read/write head crashes onto the platter) it may be impossiable...
You probably have one of those stupid IBM/Hitachi "travel-DeathStars", i had one die a few days before my class' business presentation.


I'm praying for you man... Just hope it's something else...

One thing to try, if you've got the bits you need.
Take the drive out, put it in another machine as a slave or secondary drive. Copy the drive using a good imaging program like Acronis. (Acronis can image drives even if they are in a format it doesn't understand). Then restore the drive back to a blank disk and see how much stuff you can read from it. A linux boot CD maybe your friend there.

I agree on the hardware tests are usually inaccurate... but how it got to the unix prompt tells me the disk has to be somewhat functional.

if you get an external drive, i would try putting os x on that and try running some tests yourself. i'm not entirely convinced the drive is completely hosed but the clicking definitely sounds problematic. get a copy of DiskWarrior and see if it can find/repair your disk. DiskWarrior is cheap and can be very effective in repairing filesystem damage.

it's hard to tell at this point how bad the hard drive is... but if you're handy with tools, i would consider getting a new internal drive yourself and install it yourself. if you really care about your disk, drivesavers is a good place to send your disk.

If the firewire target mode trick doesn't work, as a last resort take your system cds and re-install the system but make sure you select Archive and Install instead of Clean Install. This method will preserve your user on the drive (assuming all your music/photos were in your home directory).

Becareful about calling Apple about this. If your ibook is under warranty and you send it in to Apple for repair, they may

The problem with sending it to apple for repair is you won't get your origional hard drive or data back. They will just swap your bad hard drive with another; usually a rma received from the hd manufacture. Also they not responsiable for any loss data.

Also, another good place to send your dead hard drive in for data recover is DigitalMedix, when we can't recover data from our customer's dead hard drives, we usually refer them to this company and i've personally heard great success from our clients.
www.digitalmedix.com

Thanks for all the help and comments guys, I will try your ideas in a few hours and I'll report back with my results. Really appreciate it!

Wow I am so happy and relieved! I finally met with my friend and connected my iBook to his in target mode and I was able to copy everything like it normally works. The weird thing is that after copying the files off I restarted my mac and it ran fine! So now I'm not so sure if the hard drive is as dead as I thought... the technitians will have the last word I guess.