Macbook's Second Crash: Help??

[KudzuChild]

All right, here's the deal: a few months ago my macbook's hard drive totally crashed. It turned out to be one in a batch of bad (manufacturer mistake) Seagates. Well, I talked to an Apple customer service representative, made a reservation for service at my local store, and they replaced the hard drive with an equivalent size/speed Hitachi. Recently my computer began to act strange, a lot of applications closing 'unexpectedly' (namely iPhoto, Safari, iTunes -- my most frequented apps). I became weary since the warranty was getting close to its end-term so I bought the extension. Well, yesterday after doing regular updates for quicktime and itunes (that's the last thing I did) I put my macbook in sleep mode only to come back a couple hours later to find it off and unable to move passed the Apple loading screen. I got pretty tense and went through every single step to revive my computer that I could. For the first four hours, the optical drive refused to work. I finally used the mouse-button trick to force the disk out (took 4 tries). I put the disk (ie the installation cd) back in and restarted while holding down the D key. This time it found no problem, even in the extended version of the test. SO, thinking I could surely just repair it, I went into Disk Utility only to see the following when I began the repair disk:

Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree

Followed, swiftly by an error that said it couldn't finish the repair.

So then I go in to erase the disk, however destructive that would be to all of my work (I was about to actually purchase an external disk to add everything onto -- however "Hi I'm a poor college student and I can't afford anything that isn't rebated, discounted, cheap and/or free"). That then showed numerous errors regardless of the form of erasure or overwrite I used:

no input/output
or
resource busy

Then I go back into attempt an erase and install outside disk utility and now it can find the physical hard drive but absolutely nothing is on it.




As soon as the package for my extended warranty is here, I intend to call Apple up and try to get it serviced.

I really can't have this computer doing these kinds of things while I'm in the middle of writing term papers or going over important notes or editing pictures/projects for class....

What should I do???

 

[chscag]

Not much you can do but let Apple repair or replace the machine. But why wait until your Applecare warranty papers get to you. Since you already paid for it, it should be registered with Apple. Take it on in to the Apple store soon as you can.

Regards.