[X Newbies] Fatal error

[Florin Alexander Neumann]

On Friday, Oct 24, 2003, at 12:19 Canada/Eastern, Noele Stollmack wrote:

> In spite of your opinion that "my" genius may be lacking in knowledge 
> - The
> repair center must have agreed with him, because they replaced the hard
> drive.

Different issue. One of economics, not of what 'keys out of order' 
means. An AppleCare client comes to you with a problem which he can't 
fix (because Apple disk tools cannot fix the 'keys out of order' 
error), but which can be fixed by replacing the drive. You can get 
drives like that for less than $50 (bulk), and a technician can replace 
it in less than 5 minutes -- or he can spend hours trying to fix it. 
How much would you have to pay your technician per hour to make 
attempting to repair the drive worthwhile?

Nowadays, troubleshooting such problems is simply not feasible, 
businesswise, except for the hobbyist or home user. The exception is 
when trying to recover data from the drive, and then one pays (through 
the nose!) for the data, not for fixing the drive. In corporations 
which have their own IT departments, the SOP is to give users hard 
drives with standard configurations and have them save their projects 
and docs on remote servers. If something goes wrong, the IT guys simply 
pull out the drive, replace it with another with the same 
configuration, and you're off to the races again.

(Incidentally, I suggest checking out 
<http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/posthoc.htm>.)

f