So, to continue the story, I decided to take yonder Mini to my local Mac shop, a place that actually just opened within a month and is now only the second Mac shop in my immediate area (the first had questionable customer service skills). Anyway, they took the drive out for $75 (and then later put it back in for another $75), and I bought a nice little firewire 2.5" enclosure for it, only to find out that nothing software based would ever be able to recover it. I tried every Mac disk util I could find, as well as some stuff in Terminal and even some Windows-based data recovery apps...nada.
The only hope would be to take the drive to a shop that would actually take it apart and recover the data by hardware...which, of course, is ridiculously expensive. I said forget it, and gave the drive and Mini back to my local Mac shop, who are now sending it off to Apple. In doing some research, I'm pretty sure the problem is the ATA controller going kaput, which of course is a non-replaceable unit. So, either Apple is going to replace the logic board, hard drive and SuperDrive, or just give me a new Mini...I'm crossing my fingers on the latter.
[
] ]'>
The only hope would be to take the drive to a shop that would actually take it apart and recover the data by hardware...which, of course, is ridiculously expensive. I said forget it, and gave the drive and Mini back to my local Mac shop, who are now sending it off to Apple. In doing some research, I'm pretty sure the problem is the ATA controller going kaput, which of course is a non-replaceable unit. So, either Apple is going to replace the logic board, hard drive and SuperDrive, or just give me a new Mini...I'm crossing my fingers on the latter.
[
] ]'>