Repeated System Crashes/HDD is no longer detected

I have a 2007/2008 MBP 2.4Ghz running 10.6.2. I was having repeated hard crashes
due, I think, to some stupid firefox mods I made a few days ago. Every 1-3 hours, the system would freeze, make that crackly thinking really hard noise, spin the beach ball, and wait for me to hard restart.

This happens 3 or 4 times today, and on the last crash, the system hangs on restart. Grey screen, spinning grey circle of circles for 10 or so minutes. I can't wait any longer, so I hard restart again, and again the system hangs indefinitely. Now I start to get a bit worried. I boot from the Snow Leopard install disk and open disk utility. From there, I attempted to verify permissions, but the process hangs with one minute remaining for at least 20 minutes. A crash while trying to repair a crash. Great. So I hard restart AGAIN, and open disk utility, this time selecting repair disk. The utility detects a few errors, supposedly corrects them, then hangs for about 2 minutes, finally culminating in the hard drive disappearing act. The bar looks complete, but the hard drive is gone from the list! GONE! I can't select it from the sidebar in Disk Utility. It doesn't show up in the Startup Disk menu. The only drive I can access is the dvd drive with the Leopard disk.

I opened System Profiler and looked under Serial-ATA, and found the only entry was for an Intel ICH8-M ACHI....I don't remember that being there. It used to be a Matsushita drive....

So that's where I'm at right now...can't find anything on google, and I want to do whatever I can before giving up hope on all my data. Haven't made a backup in a WHILE...

I have same problem with MBP 2,1 GHz Core Duo, ATA SeaGate 7.01?

Please HHHHHHHEEEEELLLLLPPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!

my mac g5 does something similar i go onto eg facebook farmville it gets almost to the end and all windows shut down usually have to restart my mac does on bingo and pgo too help us if you can please

Hi all and welcome !

Try booting into single user mode: does it? Reboot keep command + s held down...

Let me know.

regards

Ric

I did sucsessfully booting into single user mode and even have run the <fsck -fy> command. The system have found some errors on hdd but could not repaire.

Is any other way to check the hdd?

Thanks beforehand.

how do i do booting into single mode ric sorry must think im a right numpty

trojanwarhorse - how do i do booting into single mode ric sorry must think im a right numpty

The answer is in Ric's reply: Reboot keep command + s held down...

regards

Hi Ric, I can run <fsck -fy> then it founds some errors and reports back the following:
The volume Mako (that is tha name of my hd) could not be repaired..
what can I do?