Power Mac G4 MDD data recovery ftom corrupted hard drive

After my previous post on 4/7, my mac started new symptoms. When I press the power button, the mac starts up with the familiar chime showing the Apple Logo. The daisy spins and spins for a long time, and then the screen goes black and it sounds the chime again and repeats the same thing. It seems the hard drive can't be found. I'm thinking of replacing the hard drive hoping this will solve the problem.
Regretably I don't have a backup copy of recent photos. Is there anyway I can recover data from this diseased hard drive? Can commercial disk repair softwares normaly do this? Has anyone successfully recovered data this way? Any suggestion? Please let me know.

Your hard drive may have hardware and/or electronic problems or it may have a corrupted directory. Can you hear it spinning? If it has a malfunctioning component, software solutions won't be able to repair it. Professional data recovery is an option for dead hard drives, but it's very expensive. If the drive has a badly corrupted directory, a utility like Alsoft's "DiskWarrior" would be worth a try. Prosoft's utility "DataRescue" may also be worth checking out.

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