Hello. It seems that one way or another, my Macbook Pro hard drive has failed, or at least the file system is corrupted. My computer locked up a few days ago, and I impatiently forced it to shut down by holding the power button. I have been regretting that decision ever since, because I can't boot it normally anymore.

It's important to note that I had been using Snow Leopard, not Linux, before this problem occurred. I'm posting on this forum because my only success in accessing the hard drive has been by using a Xubuntu boot disc, so that's all I have to work with so far.

When I tried to repair using Disk Utility from the OS X install DVD, it gave me a lot (hundreds) of complaints about invalid nodes, and then finally said that "the hard drive could not be repaired".

Now, when I boot in Linux, I can see the hard drive mounted on my desktop, and I can actually access some of the folders like dev, bin, Library, etc. but when I go to Users/MyUsername, the folder appears empty (there is supposed to be several hundred GB of crap here). When I try to do "ls" in the folder, it gives me "Input/output error".

Based on this vague information (I can provide more), does it seem like there is any possibility of being able to recover anything? There is a lot of **** on this hard drive, but there is one directory that is VERY important, and I need to try every avenue to get it back before I wipe the hard drive.