Computers and computer parts are fun to shoot at....
Something to consider!
A recent Mac? NFW! Send it to me.
PS: I booted from the OSX CD and ran the disk first aid repair program. It can see the drive...but as empty, unformatted one. Not sure how to remedy that. It won't repair or verify, all options are grayed out.
That sounds like the situation I ran into with a customer's computer once (a school, with their grading program information, classes all set up, etc., a week away from the start of school. No pressure :-). What I ended up doing to fix it was to hook this drive in as second drive on another Mac, and from a command prompt ran an osx variant of the unix fsck (fsck.hfs, I think. file system integrity checker tool -- equivalent to Winders chkdsk) command, to rebuild the hfs catalog. After this, the drive mounted properly, all the files were there, and when I put it back in the machine it came from it booted properly.
Even failing something like that, files can be retrieved by a data recovery service, but that gets expensive.
Oleg -- if you want details on what I did, I can look them up. Whatever you do, don't do anything yet that actually writes out to this disk.