[iBook] HD failure????

[Larry Kollar]

> Both my daughter in law and a good friend (with a new Dell) had hard 
> drive failures on the same day last week.  I've owned 6 macs and never 
> had that.  Am I just lucky?  (I'm hitting wood with my knuckles as I 
> say that), or is that fairly rare?

You have to remember, Dell sells the cheapest computers because they 
buy the cheapest components. While drive failures happen on Macs too 
(another lister mentioned Travelstar drives), I'd expect them to be 
comparatively rare. But they can happen, so you should back up your 
home folder regularly.

> And, if they can only get the blue screen, is the material on the 
> drive inaccessable?

It's accessible, unless the drive itself got toasted. Usually, 
Dozeboxes  blue-screen because of a corrupted registry or other "soft" 
errors. Have them press F8 on startup to enter "safe mode" -- they 
might be able to clean things up or at least backup the important stuff 
before the good ol' nuke&pave. If they can't even get that far, you 
might be able to read it on your Mac if you can put it in a Firewire 
enclosure. Doze has home directories like OSX, although that's not what 
MS calls them, so collecting the important stuff (data files) should be 
simple enough.

--
Larry Kollar    k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
"The hardest part of all this is the part that requires thinking."
-- Paul Tyson, on xml-doc