iBook HD Died?

[admiraldennis]

My iBook and its hard drive were working perfectly fine (no signs of trouble whatsoever) up until last night when it spontaneously combusted or something because now it can't even see a hard drive attached. I've tried using Disk Utility repair on my 10.4 CD but it can't even find the physical drive, just the DVD drive. DiskWarrior doesn't know what the ****, either.

I have AppleCare and could just send it in to be replaced, but is there any conceivable way to recover some of my files from this drive? Is there any chance it's someting retarded like the drive circuts drying or a cord busting? I backed up the drive a few months ago but have done a couple projects since that I don't want to lose.

Running hardware test gives me an error of '2STF/1/4'

 

[Makosuke]

If it's not even showing up in Disk Utility or DiskWarrior, it's probably REALLY toast. That's why folks back up--sometimes a drive dies slowly, other times "POOF!" and it's totally gone. Had that happen once myself.

Anyway, there are data recovery services if there was anything really vital on the disk, but they are VERY expensive.

 

[mklos]

I'll second that. Your hard drive is F'd! Thats why you need to backup at least once a week!

Like Makosuke said, you can go to a data recovery place, but it will cost you a TON of money. Since its a Mac, it will mostly cost even more because Macs are harder to get data back from. Last time I was quoted for a notebook hard drive recovery for a PowerBook G4 (not mine) it was going to cost $1,800 to TRY and recover the data. If no data was recovered, then you wouldn't be charged anything and they'd just ship the HD back to you.