Hard disk crash file recovery

[Bill Raffensperger]

My boy's iBook had a hard drive crash at 9 months. We wanted to send 
the drive to away to get data recovery and were quoted fees of $900 to 
$1500 and up. We also wanted the iBook fixed. Sending it to Apple was 
out of the question because, if they fix it there is NO WAY to get your 
drive back. Even though it seems this problem would occur at some 
frequency, they have NO option to return the computer and the bad 
drive. Apparently they need the drive to document the component failure 
and then they somehow stick it to the vendor. So we found an Apple 
authorized repair facility who would fix the iBook under the Apple Care 
warranty and return the drive. But it cost us $210 to get the bad drive 
back.

We still haven't sent the drive away for data recovery, but we have it, 
in case we want to see what can be salvaged. There was a was a large 
iPhoto library on there that we wanted back. We also bought a 300G 
external firewire drive and back up more often, now. There is a good 
possibility that if I send the drive away for data recovery, I can 
eventually return it to Apple and get my $210 back.

That same iBook (manufacture date first week of August 2003) now has a 
logic board problem and is going back to Apple again, this time to 
Houston. My iBook (manufacture date second week of December 2001) has 
so far been fine.