Can I recover my data?

Question

Can some one give me any advice on how to recover my data, last week I was using my powerbook and I was doing what I usually do which is listening to music, surf the web, download files, chat to friends and doing some work.
Everything was fine until I saved the work that I was working on. The spinning beach ball came up, I didn’t pay much attention to it at first my machine is getting old and the beach ball appears from time to time. Unfortunately after 5 min of spinning it was still there, I though my application had crash (I was using omnioutliner pro at the time) so I did the commandoptionesc to force quit the application and nothing after 25min I ended up turning the power off the machine, and that’s when my problem started.
I restarted my machine the chime sounded and it booted to the white screen with the grey apple logo, unfortunately that’s as far as it got it would not load any further and I could also hear a horrible noise coming from the hard drive it was just constantly spinning none stop. After several attempts I still got the same results.
The next day I tried again but this time my machine loaded after waiting for almost 10min to fully load, I noticed two things first it no longer asked me for my password on login (I have an administrator account setup on this machine) and second I had about 18GB left of hard drive space on the machine before the crash happened when I did finally get it to boot up all I had left was 5GB of hard drive space.
First thing I did was start to back up my data onto an external hard drive so far I have been able to recover 40% of it, the main reason why I haven’t been able to recover the rest is that the machine is that it's so sloooooooow everything takes ages but other times it works just fine for a few minutes but then the spinning beach ball appears and that’s it the machine will no longer respond. Trying to recover all my photos and music and some work documents has been a nightmare since I have about a total of 48GB worth of data, I have tried to keep the file sizes below 500mb when I copy over to my external hard drive but either the spinning beach ball appears or its just stops all together in the middle of the transfer.
Can some one please help me get my precious data back?
Thank you

Answer 1

If that does not work, you have a mechanical problem with the hard drive which only a data recovery firm can help recover from. Those cost thousands.
Well this very much depends. If you initiate a file copy operation within OS X it verifies all operations, and the file itself. With a failing drive this can both take a massive amount of time and make the problem worse by stressing the components. It's a nightmare if the disk map is damaged.
Data recovery firms however duplicate the drive, errors and all, into an image. You can do this yourself in the Terminal using the dd command (if you have an external drive slightly larger than the failing one). I paid around £250-300 to have my files recovered this way (before I knew about dd!). They then work on the image, and typically only files that were across the physical damage are unrecoverable. Most other files are fine, however attributes such as location, date created/modified etc are lost.
The fact that the OP can still access files, albeit slowly, strongly indicates that this approach would recover the vast majority of his files without the need for a clean-room disassembly (which, yes, can cause spiraling costs).
Matt