Is my computer dead forever?

I had this error and it was a failed hard drive.
We used Disc Warrior to retrieve the files we wanted and then replaced the hard-drive.

Hopefully you are using Time Machine and backing up. If so you need not bother with Disc Warrior.

Wish I had better news for you.

Thanks! What’s Time Machine? I have most things backed up on an external, but I have some software that you can’t get anymore that I’ll be most sad to lose. Is Disc Warrior something I do myself or go to a shop?

We purchased it as a disc. It was about $79

I just sent this question to @johnpowell, perhaps he can suggest a FREE alternative.

Your hard drive is just broken. This is a pretty common issue, and something usually pretty unavoidable.

You’ll probably have to get a new hard drive and then take it into your Apple store or service center and have them replace it (for the cost of labor). Since your computer is no longer under warranty that’s probably your best and only choice. I’ve had this happen twice to my laptop hard drive and the only way I was able to fix it was to replace the entire HD.

Is the CD drive still in? You have to take it out, its trying to boot from the CD in a sense

Just to clarify, Time Machine is the Apple iOS backup in Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. it backs up to an exterior drive automatically.
We used it to restore our macbook after the drive failed and it made life a lot easier.

If it’s a 10.4 mac there is no time machine, by the way.

^ Bummer

I’ve seen it a lot hotter.

You can image your hard disk using the dd command. I’m pretty sure that dd is a default part of Mac OS 10+ but as a non-Mac-user I’m not 100% certain (it’s part of coreutils, and OSX has most of the other coreutils FWIW).
First you need to get the HDD into another machine or boot your Mac from its rescue CD or a Linux liveCD. Any Linux distro will have dd for sure.

What dd does is make a perfect bit-for-bit copy of the device. NOTE that this means it will also copy over any filesystem errors that have been written to the disk. Therefore you only use dd to make a backup before using fsck.hpfs or whatever command to do filesystem recovery.

The format of the dd command is “dd if=[input device] of=[output device] bs=[desired block size(optional)]” I strongly recommend reading the manpage before using it.

Anyway, that’s one free option. There may be others I don’t know about.

You can transfer all your information from one computer to another. I had this identical problem. My computer was an older, outdated model and it could not handle the up to date software, either. I went to computer shop and explained my situation. I had to purchase another up to date computer with more power. I bought a used computer that he guaranteed for 90 days. That was three years ago and its still going strong.

Buy a used computer and bring your whole system up to date, Its worked for me.

Thanks, all! @dverhey My neighbor thought it wouldn’t be worth it to buy just a new harddrive because 10.4 is so outdated by now. Think I could pull it off?

@john65pennington How does one even begin finding a used computer?

I say it’s still worth it. Hard drives are usually only about 80 bucks maximum and then the labor to put the hard drive in would be around 50 to 60 bucks, probably.

You’ll lose all your data, but you will have a working computer again.