My HD won't show up on Desktop and Finder

[Paysense]

I owned my iMac for a couple years and the Hard Drive finally gave out. It messed up and now I can't get past this boot up screen

I inserted snow leopard and tried reinstalling the OSX, but it needed me to reformat the hard drive causing me to lose all the files I have on it.

So I'm trying to back it up. I took my girlfriends (working) Macbook and hooked it up to the iMac through firewire

Then turned my iMac on and held down the "T" button on the keyboard til this came on.

Which means it's acting like an external hard drive. It was working fine. I had transferred over a couple files and I got cocky. I bravely started putting huge files, so I can let it sit and transfer all the data. . . but my girlfriends computer(the Macbook) couldn't handle it. It wouldn't stop the little colorful swirl. And so I restarted the Macbook.

Upon start up the iMac's HD no longer showed up on the desktop just the external HD i was backing up the files to(Famalam).

Does anyone know what I can do to get it to show back up?
I typed in terminal cd/ Volumes
then ls
and it showed that it's there.

It's the highlighted part in the above picture

I renamed the iMac's HD to "Kill Harddrive" in tribute to the movie Kill Bill lol
but anyway you see that it shows up as if it's there. . . but I can't access it.
Solutions???

 

[Mactrillionaire]

I see you restarted this thread, but my advice remains the same. If the data on that disk is valuable enough to you then it should be sent to a data recovery specialist (and in the future you should do backups weekly).

I understand that you are trying to save some money by the approach in this thread, but what you don't realize is that if these efforts fail, the disk may be too damaged for recovery to be possible as a result of forcing it to work when there is a problem with it. The bottom line is that you have no way to know what is causing the problem with the disk because you would have to open it up to figure that out and I doubt you have a class 100 clean room to do so with; furthermore, it is often wise to rebuild a failing hard disk from donor parts before it totally fails or otherwise, depending on the problem, you could actually destroy the data attempting to recover it by whatever asinine suggestion you find on the internet (i.e., putting it in a freezer). Chalk it up to experience, but I've dealt with these situations before as you did before I really knew as much about hard disks and I've learned my lesson. As far as the question, I'm not going to help you try to mount it in other ways because I know you have about a 10% chance of achieving what you are after and about a 90% chance of making further recovery efforts difficult or impossible. The writing is on the wall. At some point, we have to take an action that is going to help the situation or at least prepare so we don't face the same situation in the future.