Blinking question mark, windows sees unallocated drive.

I have a blinking grey file folder on my A1286 Late 2011 Macbook pro. I hooked the hard drive up to a PC via USB to see if HFS explorer could see my files. HSF didn't see the drive at all. Windows disk management saw it as unallocated. Is there any hope of file retrieval at this point?

While you still had the drive in your Mac, did you try booting with the CMD and R keys held down, then selecting Disk Utility and try a Verify/Repair of the drive?

Welcome to Mac-Forums..

Sounds like you've got a failed drive. Did this happen out of the blue? Were there any bizarre hangs or crashes or anything that preceded this?

If it's showing up as unallocated, looks like you've lost the FAT table..so which the data might be intact, it's hard to get to it..

Most software recovery programs function when the HD in question can actually be seen by the computer, if that isn't the case, not sure how far these programs would get.

If there is vital information that is on the HD that you don't have backups of, you might have to go down the professional data recovery route that can get quite expensive..

I tried the disk utility option after an internet recovery but it only showed the DVD and base apple OS with a size of about 1.6 GB which seems to be a reasonable size for a recovery partition of some kind but definitely not the 750GB I needed to see. The only event preceding this was me letting the battery die.Any help would be appreciated!! Thanks for the quick replies!

So do we think it can be recovered? The hard drive physically works but I'm a lot more experienced with PC repair so I'm unfamiliar with the process.