getting files off bad hard drive?

[Lewis]

I have two Powerbook G4s, one old and one new, both upgraded ot Tiger (OS 10.4.1). With no warning the old Powerbook G4 now won't boot up--the spinning swirl goes on endlessly. You can hear the hard drive spinning irregularly--instead of a smooth whirr, it's in fits and starts. It's out of warranty and the Apple store confirmed the HD is in bad shape.
Disk Warrior didn't detect a HD. I've connected this one with my new Powerbook in hopes of getting off some of the files. I got it into target mode and I did get the icon on my new laptop but after an hour only one of the folders was beginning to show up. I tried the Data Rescue (both in the new laptop, and with the bootable CD in the old one) and it seemed to work but after seemingly having copied my files to the new laptop, they are nowhere to be found?
ANY OTHER IDEAS? THANK YOU!

[GX1_Man]

That's why you must backup, backup and backup. I believe if you have tried all of this it is hosed, unless you want to pay a data recovery company a lot of money.

Sorry.

[lewis]

Yes--this is my son's laptop and i am always yelling at him to back up. I think he learned his lesson this time.
But believe it or not I got the HD to boot up from a system install disk and it acted absolutely normal for a few hours. During this time i got off everything essential and emailed it to myself and burned things to CDs.
Then it froze and has not booted up since--I and my son were very lucky!!

[GX1_Man]

Congratulations. Do you want to go to Vegas with me?