Can't find my Hard Drive

[jkpieren]

My imac is about 1 year old. It is a 20 inch 2.4 intel iMac. It froze today the mouse wouldn't move or anything. My kids were messing around with it. So I just turned it off and back on. After a couple of minutes of gray screen a folder with a question mark flashes over and over again.
So I got on my macbook to see what it meant, I found out that the iMac couldn't find its start up disk. So I went to apple support trouble shooting and it said start it up using the install disc which I did. It said go to start up utility and repair the disc. The start up disc doesn't show up, so they said if that happens reset the PRAM, which I did like 3 times, and nothing.

They said if all these steps fail just reinstall using the installation disc. Which I did but when it said where would you like to install Mac OS X, you would normally see the Hard Drive Icon and it is gone, there is nothing there.

Somebody out there has got to know how I can get it back, some trick, not sure, this is so weird. THey said if nothing works contact an Apple specialist. I don't have apple care anymore and don't really want to bring it in and spend the money, also I don't want to lose anything on the Hard drive.

ANY IDEAS?

THanks

 

[hotpinksharpie]

The same thing happened to me about a month ago with my pre-intel iMac G5. I took it in to a Mac specialist and was told the hard drive was dead. I was able to recover my data using the Data Rescue II software which I highly recommend. You can go to the site and download a demo of the software to your macbook, then connect the macbook to your imac using a firewire cable (if you have one), and turn on the imac holding down the T key. Then launch the data rescue demo and if your hard drive is visible there then you should be able to use the software to rescue your data. Then you can just buy a new hard drive and replace it - a matter of a few screws and a special screwdriver. If you don't have a firewire cable and/or just feel like biting the bullet you can spend the $99 for the data rescue CD outright and see if you can boot the computer from the Cd.

Could be something different on your computer, but this is definitely the exact same thing that happened to me and was totally fixable doing the above. Good luck!