Os X Disaster Recovery From Powerbook, Oh help this suxors Options

[dinofond]

I have the elusive blinking folder on boot with my power book running OS X 3.9 with a question mark. I was on the road to Denver working on a track for an artist I am engineering, I had about 7 tracks going and opened up the Sampler in Logic Pro. It froze, after waiting about a half hour I shut the notebook down. When I rebooted I was in OS X hell. I need to recover this song, I am assuming it’s a bad hard drive. I know there is a way to hook a fire wire drive up and boot the machine to do a complete backup. Before I troubleshot the notebook to see if I can fix it I need to do the data recovery. Any help with the recovery and repair would be absolutely helpful.

Thanks,

-Dino

[banevt]

If you have access to another computer you can try to start up your laptop in target disk mode. All you have to do is power down your laptop and turn it on again then when you hear the chime press the "T" button on your laptop. Keep holding it down until you see the firewire icon bouncing around in a black screen. Now you should be able to connect your laptop to another computer like an external firewire drive. Hopefully if things aren't too messed up you can get to the data on your laptop. If you connect it to another computer and it ask you to reformat the drive don't do it. I did this before cause I needed to get to some data in a hurry and didn't have time to repair the disk and it worked. Then when I tried rebooting the computer with the problem it found the OS and started up normally but there was still a problem to fix so I ended up backing up my data and doing a clean install. Anyway hope this helps

Valente