Dead drive, desperately trying to rescue files..

Hi,
The SATA drive on my black Macbook has packed in without me backing up via TimeMachine.. (yes, we all learn from our mistakes the hard way, sooner or later, I guess) I'm desperately trying to retrieve whatever I can from it. There doesn't seem any hope as all I'm getting is that cursed question mark flashing, the machine can't find a drive to boot from. The one thing that slightly confuses me is although I can boot from SL install DVD, I can't do the same from Disk Warrior or Data Recovery DVDs.. Obviously I cannot run disk utility from the install DVD as there doesn't seem to be any drive to run repairs on. I'm thinking of running the OS from a firewire drive but can't even figure how to do that. Terminal commands are a no-go as I can't boot from Single User.
This IS the worst case scenario and I'm wondering whether any of you out there has ever dealt with such a state with success?

My drive is dead also, though it is still not showing it clearly!
I still have it and when I run a test on it (Mac or Win), everything look's OK - including SMART.
The most obvious sign was a slow system, showing the umbrella all the time, without an apparent reason. After a hard reset, it did not boot up at all.
I could recover most of my data by booting from an external drive with a clone of the system on it.
I say "most of the data" because, lately, for several months, I was getting "Error - 36" on some files, without being able to find out why. It was happening with photos in iPhoto Library and, now I know that is because I mostly used that library.
When I could not boot anymore, some other files got that error too.
The drive is the 120 GB Fujitsu, Mac Book came with. And, like I said, it is not totally dead: it has moments when it runs like nothing happened.
Message was edited by: getablonda
I would suggest you to buy a new drive, reinstall OSX and try to recover afterwards.

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