To make matters worse--or at least more complex--I had installed a new version of Mac OS on my computer while in San Francisco. That wouldn't make restoring from an out-of-date bootable backup like SuperDuper's impossible, but it would make it less ideal.

My first step, then, was to try to coax data off the seemingly dead drive.

First, I booted into : I held down the Option key while my Mac started up, and chose to start from Lion Recovery instead of my malfunctioning main drive. (In truth, Lion Recovery uses a partition of your main drive, but in my case, it worked.)

In Lion Recovery, I ran Disk Utility, asking it to repair my main drive. Disk Utility indicated that, in its view, my hard drive was beyond repair. Uh-oh.