hard drive issue HELP

Dear all,

My black macbook is about 10 months old and was working perfectly fine until last night. I tried turning it on and there's a folder icon with a question mark and it wont start.

I tried calling apple support, they directed me to a certified service center since i'm out of the country. They casually told me that my hard drive was dead and that was it. I'm not much of a techie so I don't really know how things work. At the service center they connected an ext. hard drive and tried loading from it but it wouldn't detect my hard drive.

I think i'm in a state of shock, the reason i switched to mac was so i wouldn't have to go through things like this and i don't have back ups. And to hear them so casually, unapologetically say that it has crashed, not even a sorry, I feel like shi*t.

My installation disks are back home in the US. I'm going to get them mailed to me.

Does anyone think it is possible at this stage for my drive to be repaired without losing too much information if I get the installation disks?

I am extremely disappointed with Apple's service & of course the fact the my hard drive has "crashed" after 10 months of moderate use.

Is replacing the hard drive going to solve the problem? How do I know its not a hardware problem and that it won't happen again?

I'm literally losing my mind.

140 GB of important photos, documents & work related stuff. My back up hard drive (Sea Gate) died last week, I was just shopping around for a new good/cheap one. If i had known I only had 1 week to back my stuff up, i probably would have bought the 1st ext hard drive that i saw.

talk about bad luck. Someone please say a lil prayer for me.

Thanks for reading.

Any insight will be very appreciated

G'day and welcome to the Forum even if circumstances are not too good!

HDD, and laptop 2.5" models in particular are not built for repair in this throw away society. When you get your Macbook back, with no doubt a new HDD replaced under warranty, get an external HDD and case and start baking up using Time Machine or SuperDuper which is just great.

From time to time run Disk Utility for internal and external and check out the S.M.A.R.T. verified reading.

Good luck and remember, this has happened to all computer users and we have come through it!

recovery programs?

Thanks for the welcome!

Would a program like data rescue 2 or data warrior be likely to recover something or is my drive beyond all that since it didn't even show up when the technician loaded from an ext hard drive?

shreyy said:

Thanks for the welcome!

Would a program like data rescue 2 or data warrior be likely to recover something or is my drive beyond all that since it didn't even show up when the technician loaded from an ext hard drive?

Click to expand...

RE: Data Rescue II

It's probably worth a try for the $99.00 the program costs. According to their literature, you boot your Mac from their rescue CD, attach an external drive and copy whatever data you can from the dead drive to the external. (The rescue program runs from the CD.)

Certainly a lot less expensive than sending the dead drive to a professional data recovery place.

For future reference, you might wish to get "Carbon Copy Cloner" in order to backup your new drive to an external Firewire or USB drive. It's a free program and works well. You can even use it along with Time Machine.

Regards.

thanks guys!

Do you get a ticking noise when you turn the machine on? Thats not a good sign if it does.

Just remember it might be a mac but it still uses the same components as a pc and still have the same tolerances against shock.

Always, always backup, especially on laptops that get moved around a lot

So I went to another Apple certified reseller where they confirmed that the drive was dead. But, they have a tie up with a data recovery company and offered to send it in.

However, if they need to open the hard disk for recovery purposes, they said apple will not replace the hard drive because they will consider it 'tampered'

Is there any way to get around that? I could just ask them I guess but i hear that they don't usually okay it.

If the heads are damaged or if the head motors are shot, you will have no choice except to have someone open the HDD and try to retrieve the data from the physical disks themselves. It won't be cheap either -- it will easily cost more to retrieve the data than the price of a new HDD if you have to open up the old one. So it really boils down to a question of how valuable you think your data are.