Is my hard disk fried?!?
I restarted several times throughout the day, still not working well. I checked for software updates on all the affected programs, all were up to date. I rebooted from CD, ran disk utility on it, it said everything was fine. I knew it wasn't fine so I started to back up my files just in case - I had two firewire backup drives daisy chained to the computer. It was having great difficulty backing up to the master backup drive, all files would copy painfully slowly. What was usually a 30 second back up took up to 2 hours if it worked at all without stalling. I have no idea what, if anything, actually got backed up. Again I started from CD and ran disk utility to fix the drive and again it said nothing was wrong.
I quit off disk utility which prompted a restart and ejected the disk. It restarted slowly but allowed me to log in my user and loaded my desktop. While launching the start up programs I have (Mail and Firefox auto start) it stalled. I could move my mouse, view the desktop but nothing else. I waited about 10 minutes to see if it would recover and when it didn't resolve and wouldn't allow me to force quit the programs it was hung up on, I hard restarted using the power button. Upon launch, I got the white screen with the question mark in the file.
I've followed every direction on this page http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570. I can still successfully start from CD but I can't run disk utility as it isn't even recognizing that I have a hard drive. Where my hard disk is supposed to be, it has the icon and says media. It shows the total capacity as 0 bytes and that it's an unformatted drive.
I don't know what to do from here - I really need the information that is on this drive if possible as I have a work deadline looming and I have no idea if it backed up or not. I'm going to drag the back up drives to the inlaws as they have a mac and see what I do have copies of. I was also considering trying to access it in target disk mode off of her computer. Is this a bad idea?
We live in a small town and there is no local mac support. Any information as to what I can do to fix my computer and get the info off of it is greatly appreciated!!
imac, Mac OS X (10.6.1)