Folder w/ Question Mark - Disk Utility sees drive, DriveWarrior doesn't

[chimaera15]

My macbook greeted me with the gray screen and folder with question mark this morning - I've tried everything listed on the Apple website for this issue, I've tried running the DiskUtility (although I'm getting an "error no valid packages" message) and I've tried running DiskWarrior.

DiskUtility sees the harddrive - DiskWarrior does not.

The hard drive only "clicks" 3 times at bootup, but it stops immediately after. Can I conclude that the hard drive is not entirely defective that it's just a bad header, or boot sequence or whatever "fixable, I won't lose all my data" error?

My other question is that if I can see the hard drive in DiskUtility, is it possible to create an image of it that I could say extract the data from on another Mac?

Thanks.

 

[HLdan]

Your hard drive is most likely failing. Put in the restore disc and bootup to the install screen, choose Disk Utility from there and highlight the startup volume in question and choose Repair Disk. See if any errors come up. But most likely it's failing.

 

[chimaera15]

The "repair disk" option is grayed out - in order to activate it I have to click on "verify disk" but then I get an error : "No Valid Packages".

From what I read it's because the BaseSystem.pkg file is not in /Library/Receipts or it's a different one than the original install cd, and that I'd need to replace it with the correct version. Problem is that I have no way of doing so, unless there's some form of command prompt I could use (i.e. dos on windows)

 

[HLdan]

The Repair Disk option is grayed out? Are you booting to the install screen using the restore disk as I recommended? You have to access Disk Utility this way only to use Repair Disk.

 

[chimaera15]

Yes I'm booting to the install screen, and the Repair function, but repair disc is grayed out - from what I read the only way to activate it is by verifying the disc first, which fails because of this 'no valid package'