Mid '09 MBP bootup issue - flashing folder; possibly a fried drive?

Question

Hi All,
This is my first post here. Today my 14 month old MBP 15-incher froze in the middle of some casual browsing/iTunes listening and decided to not respond to any mouse or keyboard input. I gave it some time to figure itself out and then after about 5 minutes of nothing, decided to force a shutdown by cutting power (10 second power button hold). Then upon my next boot the computer gives the chime, shows the grey screen (no  logo), does nothing for ca. a minute and a half and then presents me with the glorious flashing questionmark-folder-whatever logo. Just great.
I reset the PRAM (option + command + p + r), tried Safe Booting (shift + boot), tried forcing the laptop to boot into the default os x drive/partition (x + boot), tried booting with GUI boot location selector (option + boot) and, when all mentioned practices failed, inserted a retail copy of snow leopard and booted the machine to the ODD.
Disk Utility confirmed my fears: the main HD has no partitions and the "First Aid" tab can't verify or repair the disk.
Help me out here, guys. Is my drive dead (and all my data gone)? Is this a "directory collapse"-style issue? I had one of those babies a month ago on an '07 white MacBook... a new HDD and two hours of data restoration work for $150 at a local Mac-centric repair shop fixed that issue. But this seems a little more serious.
I was two days away from activating a central Time Machine backup to the home-network-attached 2TB HDD, for both Mac laptops in the household. I was also two days away from getting a Crashplan.com family package (yes, I wanted double backup). Why 2 days from now? Because my Carbon Copy Cloned backup HD (a WD elements 1TB) died a week ago. As in, "started-puffing-out-smoke" died.
Perfect timing.
Ideas? Please?
<Edited by Host>

Answer 1

I also suspect your internal HD has crashed. You can run Apple Hardware Test and then Google any error codes however I believe it's probably gone.
Without any backup yes your data is probably gone, there are data recovery services however they are extremely expensive.
If you purchased AppleCare you can take it an AASP for repair however they probably cannot do a thing about your data. If you are not covered by AppleCare of course the expense will be your however look at this as an opportunity to upgrade the internal HD to something with more storage or is faster.
Once you have the new HD installed you will need the original Snow Leopard Install Disks (or possibly your retail copy of SL) to format the new HD and re-install SL and the iLife applications.
Roger
Good luck,
Roger