Hard Drive Failure on MacBook-What to do now?

[rekhyt]

Just experienced a hard drive failure right now on my MacBook (2007). Everything had froze and I shut it down. When I started it again, the screen was dimmed and the Apple jingle went on a louder sound then before. Is this a sure sign of a MacBook hard drive failure or would it be related to something else, for example, the logic board?

Also, what should I do now? Last full backup was 3 weeks ago and I had worked on lots of things between that period of time and now.

 

[noobsauce]

If it starts up, do a complete backup and check the SMART status of the drive.

 

[rekhyt]

It doesn't start up-The screen just is dim and has a darkened white background on the screen. When I press the power button, it immediately powers off instead of having me hold it to initiate the power down.

Any chance that this is a logic board failure or something else? Or is the hard drive full? I had ~4GB of HD space left.

 

[noobsauce]

It is definitely full if you have only 4GB of space left, try booting from the OS X install disk and verify your hard drive with disk utility. If there are any errors, try formatting the hard drive and if there are still errors, get a new hard drive and reinstall OS X from one of your backups.

Hope I Helped

 

[rekhyt]

Yep-It's definitely strange, as the symptom of a hard drive failure would be a broken folder, yet this is just a very dim white screen and apparently default volume for the startup chime.

How would I boot up from the OS X install disk if the Apple logo does not appear? I can't do the alt/option to select the disk.