IMac hard drive crashed?

Last night I was using my iMac for regular school work and I shut it off after. In the morining I turned it on and it showed a flashing folder with a question mark. I tried all the usual stuff such as turing it on and off, resetting the PRAM, and holding down the option key. Then I tried putting in a old snow leopard dvd I had and holding down command + R. Which brought up the OS X Install. I opened up Disk utility and my hard drive wasnt there.!!!??? I have important pictures and files on that hard drive. What can I do? I am looking for an option I can do myself.
Question: Will I be able to recover my files if I buy an external SATA encloser for the hard drive? I have no problem opening my iMac up.
If you have an questions, do ask and thanks for your help.

Ouch...
You need at least another drive or 2, one to install the OS to, then...
Data Rescue...
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
(Has a Free Demo to see if it could or not, but you'll need another drive to recover to).
rccharles on file recovery...
"Stellar Phoenix Macintosh - Mac data recovery software, recovers data from damaged, deleted, or corrupted volumes and even from initialized disks."
They have a trial version, so I guess you can see if your data can be recovered...
http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-data-recovery.htm
FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:
    * been accidentally deleted.
    * become unreadable due to media faults.
    * been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.
http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id= 1
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11073082#11073082
But, if the frive doesn't show up in those even....
Or professional Data Recovery Services.

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IMac hard drive crashed?

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