Hard drive just died..help!

I have a late 2006 MacBook 13inch which has given me no problems till today when my hard drive died. My computer froze and when I tried to restart it, it gave me a flashing folder with a question mark on it. When I booted from the instillation disk, it told me that my hard drive has failed!

Is it worth it for me to buy a new hard drive and install it? It's almost 5 years old now, so I don't know if it'll work with a new hard drive. Or should I just look into getting a new laptop? Does anyone have any experience with this? Also, if the hard drive has failed, is there any way to restore my files? My backup is about a year old, I know not smart!

A new harddrive will cost you about 50 bucks and will work with your computer with out a problem. Up to you if you would rather pend 50 on a drive or hundreds on a computer. As for recovering files there a some programs that will very slowly try to recover what they can. No guarantees on anything though and I dont know what the programs are.

Yes, that is still a very useable machine. Pretty much any SATA 2.5" Form Factor Notebook drive will work. If you really want to be sure, buy it from OWC as they guarantee it will work in your machine.

If you want purchase an external enclosure and put in the old drive. You might be able to recover a lot of your files unless the drive is totally dead. Just be sure the enclosure supports your 2.5" SATA notebook drive.