[Gargoyle]

If you have not backed up your data today, DO IT NOW.

My drive in my MacBook just gave up. No warnings, no read errors, no slowdowns in reading or writing files. The system just hung and will not reboot. The drive clicks for 30 seconds then spins down.

Unfortunately my NAS box chucked a wobbler last weekend, and I had to reinstall that and I had only backed up my "business" files. So all my apps photos, itunes, etc are now in the hands of data recovery quotes! If any of the quotes come back under £200 I'll probably pay up. If, however, they are more than that I am going to try a few tricks myself and would like to ask if anyone has a drive they want to sell to me.

The drive must be almost identical to mine:-

Model: ST98823AS
FW: 7.01
Purchased: June 4th 2006 (3 days out of warranty - see below)
Number on the logic board on the bottom of the drive: 100349359 Rev B

If anyone has a matching donor (preferably UK) then please reply here or PM me to discuss details.

Why didn't I just ask about a warranty repair?
In the past I have had Macs repaired under warranty when they were just outside their 12 month period and I am sure Apple would have probably replaced my drive in this case since it's just 3 days out of warranty. But I do not want to be without my laptop for too long - it's amazing how much if my day-to-day life happens via this machine in some way.

Apple would have taken my laptop off me and sent it away for repair, and I would have got it back in some days (or weeks) with a nice new HD. However, I would not have my old drive and absolutely no way of recovering my data.

I have already got a new replacement samsung drive for £35 (It's who you know, not what you know ) and a nice clean OSX is just re-applying updates as I type this on my Linux box. I should be back up and running with my core Apps in a few hours.

Do you know the really strange thing about today?
A few hours after my MacBook died and it was safely packed away in my bag. I was adding additional drives to one of our development servers in work. I had the machine on my desk and the new drives were all working fine and I did a few reboots to check everything was stable.

I then unplugged the server and put it back in the cabinet and booted it up only to be faced with an "insert proper system disk" prompt. The existing hard drive in that machine had gone too! So my crappy day was finished off my having to reinstall Windows Server 2003

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

[beardedmacuser]

Ouch! That's bad luck. Have you thought of shoving the drive in a Windows machine and running something like SpinRite? It has recovered "dead" laptop drives from a few folk here at work.

[Gargoyle]

Nah, It's a mechanical failure of the drive. After 45 seconds of it being powered up the drive poweres itself down.

I have sprung the money for the data recovery which has all but wiped out my small sideline business, so I had better pull my finger out and get some more moonlighting done!

[Gargoyle]

Just wanted to revisit this and remind you all to backup.... Now!

The data recovery place wanted £300 for the repair, after much consideration I decided that some photos and other bits and the time I would save in re-importing CD's etc might just be worth it... but the greedy mofo's rang me back and said they would need another £120 ontop of the original quote, I told them to get stuffed and send the drive back.

So in the end I did not pay out any money, and after trawling through a bunch of CD's/DVD's I found a 10 month old backup that had 70% of my stuff - I am missing some photos from a few friends weddings and 10 months worth of emails (most of them useless anyway) - not so bad after all.

[SpecMode]

Just backed up a couple days ago to an external 500GB RAID-1 array. Not taking any chances, I do most of my photo processing on this machine.