Chosen Solution
I pulled the power cord by mistake. After powering up again a file folder/? began flashing. Apple support could not help. Genius bar had a few costly suggestions. I viewed the tutorial for removing the hard drive. I can do that. Can I recover data from this drive? Is vantech something that would do the job? What replacement drive would you recommend? ThanksPete
Just start up from your system installation disk and go to the second screen pull down menu to Utilities > Disk Utility and see if the drive can be repaired. You probably just corrupted your system folder.
You could put the drive into an external USB enclosure and connect it to another mac (or the same mac after replacing the drive) to see if you can read the data and copy it off. Then you can put another new drive in the enclosure and use it for time machine backups :)
