one last attempt to save data - diskwarrior boot getting "NO" symbol?

[proglife]

hello!

my girlfriend's white macbook drive is possibly trashed and of course, she hasn't been backing up. i'm trying to, at the very least, attempt to salvage her many years of photos.

When I boot normally, i get the "you need to restart" screen of death.

I ran Disk Utility from my OS disc and it fixed some things and appears to be OK (according to disk utility)

In Disk Utility, the hard drive shows up but Macintosh HD is greyed out. When I try to reinstall the OS and I have to pick a destination drive, the hard drive doesn't show up. When I try to mount the drive in Disk Utility, it says it can't mount. When I try to mount the drive on a different computer using Target Disk Mode, it won't mount. When I try to choose a startup disk on the OS disk's startup disk menu, the drive doesn't show up.

As a last resort, I've picked up a copy of Diskwarrior and am trying to boot to the DVD. It lets me choose Diskwarrior, but then I get the spinning "loading" image and the "NO" symbol, as in no smoking.

What other options do i have? Thanks for any help. My girlfriend and I appreciate it!

[proglife]

items of "interest" in single user mode

disk0s2: I/O error

jnl: unknown-dev: do_jnl_io: strategy err 0x5

panic "nfs_boot_init failed with blah blah

Mac OS version:
Not yet set

it gives me system uptime but no ability to input anything

[proglife]

started the macbook up in target mode through a different laptop... even though it won't mount up on the desktop, i still tried firing up diskwarrior

"Directory cannot be rebuilt due to a disk hardware failure

This Disk appears to be a Mac OS Standard disk
This Disk does not appear on the desktop

[gorn]

Don't format yet, keep holding out!

It sounds like your filesystem maybe trashed but the hard drive is physically okay. If the filesystem is unrecoverable then you might be able to get just the JPEGs (her photos) using a program like Exif Untrasher . It's meant for SD Cards but in theory it should work on a hard disk. Note that this will find every still contiguous jpeg on her system, which will likely include plenty not from iPhoto (think browser cache or computer games), and likely some she has deleted before (think ex-boyfriend). You should explain this to her and the privacy concerns before continuing.

You could also do this by hand using unix tools such as dd and awk, if her data is very important and your time is not. But I don't recommend it.

[proglife]

thanks for your reply! i'll read up on exif untrasher

Don't format yet, keep holding out!

It sounds like your filesystem maybe trashed but the hard drive is physically okay. If the filesystem is unrecoverable then you might be able to get just the JPEGs (her photos) using a program like Exif Untrasher . It's meant for SD Cards but in theory it should work on a hard disk. Note that this will find every still contiguous jpeg on her system, which will likely include plenty not from iPhoto (think browser cache or computer games), and likely some she has deleted before (think ex-boyfriend). You should explain this to her and the privacy concerns before continuing.

You could also do this by hand using unix tools such as dd and awk, if her data is very important and your time is not. But I don't recommend it.

[proglife]

trying Exif Untrasher...seems like I can't run the app against a drive that I can't mount. Do you have any suggestions on how I could do that?

Don't format yet, keep holding out!

It sounds like your filesystem maybe trashed but the hard drive is physically okay. If the filesystem is unrecoverable then you might be able to get just the JPEGs (her photos) using a program like Exif Untrasher . It's meant for SD Cards but in theory it should work on a hard disk. Note that this will find every still contiguous jpeg on her system, which will likely include plenty not from iPhoto (think browser cache or computer games), and likely some she has deleted before (think ex-boyfriend). You should explain this to her and the privacy concerns before continuing.

You could also do this by hand using unix tools such as dd and awk, if her data is very important and your time is not. But I don't recommend it.

[fluffyx]

This log entry:
"disk0s2: I/O error"
means that the drive is physically failing.

You need professional cleanroom data recovery.