MacBook will not start up

Hi eveyone.

I am not a technical person at all so any help or advice would be much appreciated. My Mac book will not bring up my desktop. The display comes on but it never shows the desktop it just sits there doing nothing. I have alot of .PSD I need for a project that I have been working on for weeks. Please someone help me!

Some things you can try...

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/durepairfns.html

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/finder.html

I will give this a try... hopefully it works. Thanks for the info.

I tried to follow the steps but the computer started to make some strange sounds almost like star wars just wierd.

Does booting from the Install disk work?
Where you able to use Disk Utility?

I got fed up and took my Mac Book to the Apple store. They looked at it for about five minutes and then told me the hard drive was bad. I really need those PSD's and really everything on the hard drive so I took it to a data recovery company that the Apple store recomended. I will let you know how it goes. I wish I would have backed up my stuff. I am really mad at myself right now. Can anyone recomend a good way to back my stuff up in the future? I have about 20GB worth of stuff.

You definately need an external Hard drive. There are a lot of recommend external drives in this forum.
Which OS are you using?

I got my data back! The company that recovered my data was Sector Logics Data Recovery. They were excellent. They gave me advice on how I should back my data up and sold me an external hard drive as well. It cost me $1600 but it was well worth it. Do yourselves a big favor and back your stuff up. I highly recommend these guys if you run into problems with your hard drive. Thanks for all your help Soulwar.