Another hard drive death story (and a question)

Question

Well, add me to the list of people whose MacBook's internal hard drive (80 GB) has croaked. It happened to me in precisely the same way as everyone else has reported, except that I didn't notice any grindy/clicky noises since I was listening to my iPod. This is getting way too common to be called random, isolated incidents, methinks.
So I was surfing away and got the eternal beach ball - I thought maybe I'd just overworked the poor thing by having lots of applications and windows open. It wouldn't restart in any tidy way, so I had to just power it off. When I tried to boot it after that (which took forever), the hard drive was no longer recognized. Even after booting from the Install Disk, the hard drive did not show up in Startup Disk, Disk Utility, or Installer. The hardware diagnostics showed no problems. PRAM resetting did nothing.
I'm wondering two things:
(1)Has anyone had their hard drive come back from this situation, say for instance by taking it out, giving it a good smack upside the head, and then reseating it? The reason I ask is that my iPod just recently had a hard drive issue where I did hear it make very distinct unhappy grindy noises, and posts here on the Apple Discussions board lead me to the suggestion to do some violence to it to fix it. Sure enough, a few firm slaps and the thing popped right back to life. I also remember back in the Mac II days, whatever factory-installed drive was in their routinely seized, and the genearlly-accepted fix was to open up the case, and give the top of the drive a good hard whap with a hammer. Yes, Apple themselves actually told me to try this, and it worked like a charm, and worked for everyone else in my office. So you see where I'm going with this violent urge...
(2)Being as my backups were a bit sketchy (I was trying to set up a mirror on an external drive), I'd like to try to recover some data if I can, and I also hate the idea of having to send the thing back to Apple and be without it for weeks. Do you think that if it didn't have to be the boot drive that I might have better luck accessing it? The aforementioned external drive and case are still sitting here in their boxes. Maybe if I install the OS on the external drive I can figure out some way of mounting the ailing internal drive? Or do you think that the results will be exactly the same as they are with using the Install disk as the boot disk, i.e. the internal hard drive will still simply not mount? Are there any third party applications that might help if I do go ahead and install the OS on my external drive?
Thanks for any help you can offer and my sympathy goes out to all my fellow MacBook users mourning the loss of their hard drive.

Answer 1

Sigh. I do appreciate people's willingness to proffer a possible solution so quickly and thoroughly, but everyone I've seen post this issue so far has gotten the exact same advice to "run Disk Repair" when they have very obviously stated, as I did, that this is not possible. From my original post:
"When I tried to boot it after that (which took forever), the hard drive was no longer recognized. Even after booting from the Install Disk, the hard drive did not show up in Startup Disk, Disk Utility, or Installer."
-gills- also states that his hard drive is *not recognized*. The only way Disk Utility (or Startup Disk, or Installer, etc.) can run itself on a hard drive is for that hard drive to mounted, i.e. visible, to the computer. In these reported cases, our drive is no longer recognized by the computer - it's as if it's been unplugged and removed. Disk Utility is of as much use as if the drive really had been uninstalled and was sitting in the other room. Ya can't feed your dog dinner if ya don't own a dog!
Anyway, a bit of further information: I realized that my sick hard drive wasn't even spinning up. By the way, goodness no, I wasn't recommending taking a hammer to the dainty thing, just maybe giving it a little shake. That turns out to be just what I did: I removed it, blew some air inside the bay to make sure everything was clean and well-connected. Then I gave the disk a slight shake and it seemed to make a faint rattle. Nothing dramatic - it could have just been the normal sound of a slightly loose component. Anyway, I put it back in and tried rebooting.
A step forward? At least now the drive is actually spinning up and making an attempt! At first it sounded very cranky, with clicking and very labored spinning. As the machine was trying to boot, I tried tilting it in different directions, which changed the degree of pain the drive sounded like it was in. Finally, in nearly an upside-down position, the drive settled into what sounded like normal spinning. I gradually turned it back over and set it down carefully, and I retained that nice healthy sound. Sucker still doesn't boot, but now at least I have a drive that is a) spinning up and b) does not sound like there are rocks in it.
I unpackaged my new external drive and got it all set up, but exhaustion overtook me and I went to sleep. My plan to proceed is as follows:
1) Having left my MacBook to cool down, I'll try rebooting again.
2) I'll format and install the OS on the external drive so I can boot off of it, and then, if the internal drive doesn't mount, I'll look around for some sort of utility (I will definitely try TechTool Deluxe!) that will go out on the bus and try to mount the recalcitrant drive kicking and screaming. If I can get it mounted, Disk Utility then has a chance to help.
I'll keep ya'all informed of my progress. Again, any advice is welcomed.
- Sam-is-Me
P.S. For -gills-: You must have read the same post I did about ejecting your Install disk, because I couldn't get it to eject either! But then I checked with the manual, and you're supposed be doing the key sequence on startup, not shutdown. Try starting up with the touchpad pushed - that's how I finally got it to spit my disk out.