Broken hard drive or operating system My MacBook Pro froze today. When the system is restarted, it goes directly to the OS X Utilities window. None of the alternatives seem to work. I don't have a Time Machine backup, so there is no use running that program. When trying to reinstall OS X I get stuck, because I don't get access to the HD, only the Recovery HD. I also get an error message when running the Disk Utility repair program. Unfortunately, there are important files I haven't backed up? I have two questions?


Is there any hope of restoring the computer with the files and programs intact?
If not, is there a way to access the files and make backups before erasing the disk?
Question 1. see this link for how to.

1- Try a Safe Boot (hold Shift during start up)- (it does do some level of repairs).

2- You can try repairing the disk, using the Disk Utility, start with cmd-r.

3- If that does not work you can try to repair the disk using the Command fsck- fy

To get there start in single user mode (cmd-s) and enter that command fsck -fy to find out if it can repair the disk.

Question 2- 

you can use Target disk mode to recover files (you will need second Mac for that)