Help! My iMac commited suicide!

Question

Right. So I wake up this morning and turn over to look at my computer sitting on it's desk. I click the mouse to open up Safari and check my email, and nothing happens. So I click on the desktop to move to finder, and open up the drop menu to select force quit in case Safari wasn't responding. I then have the joy of my computer instantly turning off. So i try to reboot it, and when it hits the gray screen with the apple and the spinning circle it freezes, and around 3 minutes later my fan goes out of control and turns on full speed. So I shut it down with the power button, and try again. Same thing. I figure maybe if I give it time, so I repeat, and leave to make breakfast. When I return, my computer is still whirring and hasn't changed, so I shut it down. I then engage in a lovely 6 or 7 hours of troubleshooting, reading webpages on my G3, learning ways to fix things I didn't know existed in computers and trying every non-damaging suggestion I recieved. Finally, I launched my mac off the install disk after the first 30 minutes or so. It wasn't capable of repairing whatever was wrong with disk utility. So, I tried to launch it again just in case it decided to work on it's own. No luck. I open up disk utility again, and this time "233.8 GB Maxtor 6B250SO" is in bright red. So I click on that disk image. It says "This drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility. If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive." Now anyways, I've read a lot of people having the same bootup problem I did, and most of them seem to have failed logic boards that need to be replaced or are oozing gunk or some such, but none have had smart failures. What I now know, is that my computer will under no circumstance launch, and that my drive may be dead. If it's not, then I have a huge database of files that I would REALLY like to save, including more than a few hundred dollars of iTunes music. I have a feeling I just lost everything I've acquired on this computer as well as all my graphic design work since last July, and unless someone can tell me a way to salvage my completely not-backed-up files, then I might as well just send it off and scream at the wall or something. This is horrifying me, I've never really backed up files before, never thought to, and now they're possibly ALL gone. If anyone can help in any way, please respond soon to this post, or even better to my email address at [email protected]. Any help of any kind is greatly appreciated.
-David
First Gen iMac G5 17"   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Welcome to Apple Discussions
Wow. That's quite a crash. Have you spoken with Apple about your situation?
I haven't had to recover data as I backup my system daily using SuperDuper. It took but one experience of losing data to convince me to invest $150 US or so, in an external HD and another $20 for the software. My backup has helped me out of a few jams since. As the previous poster mentioned, regardless of the mfg., machines do occur malfunctions, usually at the most inconvenient time.
First things first. Before you can think about recovering files you need to know what is wrong mechanically with your iMac. Important you speak with Apple, or if the machine is outside of warranty, a certified Apple technician.
In the data recovery realm: Outside data recovery services are very expensive. There also exists software for recovering data. Not sure what any of these programs can or cannot do. To start you off, here is a Google search of "Mac OS X data recovery".