Data recovery from a disk that is unmounted

Question

Here is my problem:
disk utility had indicated that I had a couple of bad blocks in my start up disk and recommended that it be replaced. Since I already had a second internal hard drive with plenty of room on it, I simply installed OS 10.4 on the second hard drive and designated it as the startup drive.
Then I ran maintenance on the problem drive. After spending an hour or more grinding through every sector it appeared that the drive would pass master. However for some reason it hung up, stopped making progress and disabled my computer, i.e., I could move the cursor but could not click anything or select anything. Finally my only choice was to manually shut down and restart. Restart seemed to work fine except the disk on which I was performing maintenance did not show up on the desktop.
Finally I was able to locate it using disk utility and discovered that the mount point was missing and it was not mounted. Of course this is what I should have expected since techtool pro unmounts a drive while it performs maintenance and when I had to interrupt, it did not remount.
I spent three days trying to find a way to remount it, including downloading MountMe. Strangely when I ran MountMe it recognized the drive and gave me a successful remount message, but the drive was not actually remounted according to disk utility.
I have moved the drive to a different G-4 with no more success.
my greatest problem -- I had used Backup from .Mac but apparently was not careful enough about where the backup file was located. Generally I download to my desktop and then if I want to save a download I move it to an appropriate location. Unwisely I had done the same with backup which means of course that when the old startup drive crashed it took my desktop files with it.
Included among those backups were all of my financial records (Quicken) for the year. Three checking accounts, all of my credit card accounts, all of my business accounts, etc. I am talking about days of contacting credit card companies and banks for replacement of records for the year and, worse yet, they don't have the details in their files regarding the accounts to be charged nor do they have any info about inter account transfer, etc., etc., etc.
So, I am looking for a reasonably priced service provider to copy my defective hard drive for me. I don't think there is any problem with the data on the drive, I just can't get it remounted.
Maybe someone knows how to work around the mount point problem????
My main desktop computer is a G-4 quicksilver with dual 800, OS 10.4.3 and 1.4 GB of memory.
thanks,
John Cleek

Answer 1

Whenever someone reports issues with their drive my first question is always, "Do you hear any unusual noises coming from the computer?"
What I'm listening for is anything like grinding, scraping, what we always call 'ping-ponging' or other unusual clicking noises that would indicate a mechanical problem inside the drive. If you don't hear anything unusual then the problem is more likely to be corrupt volume information or a broken hard drive controller board.
If you hear noises then my recommendation is to stop trying to get anything off the drive because any more attempts would do yet more damage.
The only data recovery company I've used is www.drivesavers.com. I've called them multiple times to get quotes and their reps always seems to actualy have an idea what they're talking about. It is very expensive to use a service such as theirs but sometimes it is the only option available.