Harddrive Issue

[Ozman712]

So guys I had a bit of a scare today. I was in OSX (10.5.6) and all of the sudden everything froze. I had to do a manual restart. Once I got to the grey Apple logo, the gear kept spinning for over 20 minutes. I restarted again but no luck.

Long story short I now see that there is a problem with my Harddrive. It started to click, but now it spins up normally. The only way to get the HDD to do anything is to do a fsck restore. Once I do that, I get about 5 minutes of usable time (mounting it as an external drive on another machine) before it unmounts and I have to go through the process again.

The trouble is I don't have proper backups (I know...) and I need to get some pictures and music off the drive. (the smaller files like docs I was able to recover). Do any of you guys have any idea what I can do before this drive fully crashes?

Thanks,
Oz

FYI..the drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400 (160GB) about a year old.

 

[eman]

Insert your restore disk and use disk utility. Check and repair the hard drive integrity and repair permissions, hopefully this will get you back up and running.

 

[Ozman712]

So I now know that there is an Invalid Volume Header. Again I can mount the drive for maybe 3-4 minutes and then it unmounts. Disk Utility can see the drive, but not the named part (e.g. Macintosh HD). Is there anything I can do to recover teh data without having to buy a $100+ program. College student = no money