I have lost my wallet due to a hard drive crashing before I was able to back it up. How can I recover my wallet without having the file? I do have one of my public keys and my password. Any suggestions?
Without the private key, there’s no chance in recovering your coins. Sorry.
What happend to your HDD?
The hard drive doesn’t show up on my laptop anymore, but when I connect it, i know there is a connection between the hardware.
If you did not save your private key or a wallet.dat backup, your best bet will be trying to recover wallet.dat from damaged hard drive.
It won’t be easy and there is no warranty you’ll be even able to recover, but with enough resourses and knowledge it can be done.
You can try it by yourself, or you could hire professional service on this subject.
If you wish, I can help you remotely; it would need plenty of time and some non trivial tasks on your end, tough.
May I ask how many coins did you lost?
This specific drive was my back up for my Mac. On this wallet I had 2 coins. The manufacturer said they have my info on their cloud but want to charge me $300 to access it. At this point two coins are not worth the hassle, but I still want to recover them. What would I need to do to attempt to access the files?
Does it mean tha may be you in fact have a wallet.dat backup somewere else?
WHAT? That sounds creepy, are you okay with that?
As you are a Mac user, may be you have some familiarity with the Terminal?
If so, I will sugest you to try test disk & photorec [0], installed on a different HDD (connecting damaged HDD via USB/external port for recover only).
May I suggest to use TestDisk from a rescue Live CD [1], being GParted LiveCD my choise for this particular case.
There may be mac-specific solutions with nice user interface, but as I am not a Mac user I have nothing to suggest on it.
As you are a Mac user, it should be easy to me connect and help you using TeamViewer. If you wish, I can try. We’ll need to arrange some time during night, and It will cost you 0.22 LTC iif I manage to recover your coins.
Let me know if interested on this. Anyway, I am happy to share info to help you doing by yourself; It is better to have more people who knows how to do things, after all. 
[0] TestDisk Download - CGSecurity
[1] TestDisk Livecd - CGSecurity
Mautematico, could I perhaps ask if you know any way at all to gain access to an account without the passkey? I seem to have misplaced my notepad that had it written down. I’m not sure if there’s any way whatsoever to brute force it. Please let me know if there’s a way to contact you directly.
Ouch!
You can not access it without the passprhase. You can, however, bruteforce it with some existent tools. It would, however, be unefective if your passprhase is really strong or if you don’t have any clue of what can composite it.
I’ve sent you my personal e-mail on a private message, please check.