OT: lost everything, macbook and its HD broken.

[SimPLsol at aol.com]

Andre,
The fact that the computer will not boot from other drives is a good thing. 
It indicates that the problem is probably on the board not the HD.
I trust you've tried removing the HD from the problem computer to see if it 
works in another.
If it IS the HD, then the less tinkering the better. One of my customers had 
massive problems with one of his HDs (he reformatted it!) and a company called 
Drive Savers managed to save almost everything on it.
On OLD drives the freezer trick "sometimes" works. You wrap up the drive so 
there is no moisture. Put it in the freezer. When chilled, you bring it out and 
hit it on the side with a rubber hammer. This solves a "stiction" problem 
where the drives are overparked or stuck to the disk - as I said, usually a 
problem with older drives. Obviously a last resort, all else failed, drive is 
considered lost anyway, situation.
For future reference:
Your data is too valuable to trust to a single computer. I've found 
SuperDuper (free trial) and an inexpensive Firewire HD to be priceless. You probably 
have more data than I do so it may take longer but, in my case, I can completely 
backup about 30 Gig in 50 minutes with a 2 1/2" Firewire 400 drive - other 
drives might be twice as fast.
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear of you misfortune and wish you the best. Please 
keep all of us informed. We are rooting for you!
Paul Looney