MacBook Flashing question mark

I've searched and tried pretty much everything I've read, and nothing worked so here's my problem.

I have a Macbook (about 4 months old) running Leopard and just today I began getting the flashing question mark. I've tried pressing command+ctrl+p+r during startup, holding shift, and booting from a CD. The furthest I got was from booting with a disc(I've tried this with OS Tiger, which the computer came with, and Leopard Upgrade CD) which has gotten me still pretty much nowhere. I opened disc utility and my hard drive is not showing up at all. Thanks

 

I'm going through the exact same thing with mine, only my PB G4 is about 4 years old. If you've done all of those things and it still dosen't work, the HD is probably shot. That's seems to be the drift that I've been getting from the folks on this board. Personally, I haven't even gotten to try the disc because I've misplaced mine. I wouldn't really mind that this has happened because I was kind of looking to buy a replacement anyway. Bad thing is, all of my wife's photos are on the machine. To say that she is upset with me (I was supposed to have them backed up) would be an understatement.

 

I've been debating whether or not to take the HD to a specialist to try to salvage the photo files. At $250 just to attempt the feat and another $200 to actually do the deed, it's not cheap. Yeah, my wife's happiness and my comfortable bed are important to me, but at $450 I'm starting to wonder

 

Unless you're willing to dish out the cash like hardsc02 i think you have to kiss your HD goodbye.

Give apple a call since your still under warranty...i have heard of them covering this before.

 

that's actually a pretty decent price-- our hard drive failed and we paid almost $2000 to recover data-- had no choice as it was a business database

 

any other ideas?

 

I had the exact same thing on my 24" iMac.

I went out and bought an external drive($200) and a copy of Data Rescue 2 from Prosoft. ($100 or so)

The cost of the drive in a good investment as you will now have no excuse not to back up in the future.

With it I was able to save all of my data and start from scratch. I have had no problems with the hard drive since.

I'm not certain it will work for you but you might give it a try.

Good luck.

Darren

 

$2000 for data recovery? Ouch...
I'm going to have to mirror what kixsand said, definitely have automated backups if your data is that important to you (Time Machine).

A logic board issue cause the question mark to appear also, so have the Geniuses run diagnostics on your drive before declaring it dead. You'll have to send it in for repair to go to an Apple Store either way, but you will be able to save your data if the issue ends up being the logic board.

 

re:question mark flashing

it's probably because it can't find the system software it needs to start up. To work around with this you check, are you using a MacBook Air, then use Remote Install Mac OS X to startup from a system software DVD that's located on a partner computer and run the program. If it is not possible then use good Mac recovery software. Once I have used a Mac data recovery software that recovered by hard disk in very less time name Stellar Phoenix data recovery Mac utility. It can scan, locate and help you recover lost data in few clicks.

 

This may help:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58042

 

there is a 98% chance that the HD may be failing if its under warranty you can have the drive replaced but as mentioned if you want data it will cost you