Hard drive failure??

Well said, ypw!

I just lost my second MAcbook hard drive - seagate ST98823AS. The first was one month out of warranty last August. The second was today, two weeks after the credit card extended warranty expired. What makes this really bad was that last weekend I lost my Maxtor 750gb backup which I was using with Super
Duper to protect me from ever losing my laptop drive again. AT least this one Seagate will replace for free. I backed up some files but I am waiting for a replacement drive and really not prepared.

But most of my anger goes to Apple which replaces these crappy drives with the same crappy drives and denies that there is any problem. When I called the Apple store today to complain about only having a 90 warranty on the drive he told me it was a Samsung not a Seagate and he didn't know about any problem with these drives. Yeh, right.

I have had computers at home since the first IBM pc (which had no hard drive) But I have never had as many hard drive failures as I have this last 7 months. I have lost 2 Seagate internal MAcbook drives, a Maxtor 750 external, and 2 Seagate internal drives in my Windows XP machines. THat is 5 drives in 7 months - all Seagate or MAxtor.

Message was edited by: cwbrandt

So if enough people complain about this would it be possible to issue some type of recall? I'm in the same boat. My hard drive died last week.

ma-ma-maya wrote:
So if enough people complain about this would it be possible to issue some type of recall? I'm in the same boat. My hard drive died last week.

Personally I think there might be something done about the Apple OEM Seagate Momentus 5400.3 drives that exhibit this unusual failure mechanism. However - most hard drive crashes are of a random nature (which happen to all hard drives of all brands). I don't quite understand the conspiracy theories that hint that Apple is deliberately selecting defective hard drives or are otherwise directly responsible for these hard drive failures beyond being just another customer of hard drive makers.

I have a black 15 inch MB, which I bought in mid-2006 and my hard drive failed last Sunday night, which is driving me mad, since there is so much data on there that I need. I didn't know this proble was so wide-spread...do add me to the list of people demanding a recall from Apple and a better solution than perusing these endless discussion pages. I bought Applecare, so I'll see what good that is.

I'm based overseas (in Beirut), and the Apple-licensed dealer tells me that there may be some "powerfuL applications in the US that can retrieve this information. Is this true?

My boy friend just bought a macbook on Jan 2008 and already it has the flashing folder with question mark. Unfortunately its not under warranty. Its a shame because we love macs so much and it seems each mac computer we buy gets worse. My ibook that I purchased several years ago died and my boyfriends macbook just purchased serval months ago just died. But our Emac that we purchased way before these 2 still works but its cd-rom ceased to work after several months.
The disc utility said the macbook HD was fine but it wouldn't mount but now it says there was an error and it cannot be repaired. I don't get it. So if its just the harddrive that needs to be replaced does it normally cost about $200 for parts & labor? Or can I do it myself? This ***.

mi*squared wrote:
My boy friend just bought a macbook on Jan 2008 and already it has the flashing folder with question mark. Unfortunately its not under warranty. Its a shame because we love macs so much and it seems each mac computer we buy gets worse. My ibook that I purchased several years ago died and my boyfriends macbook just purchased serval months ago just died. But our Emac that we purchased way before these 2 still works but its cd-rom ceased to work after several months.
The disc utility said the macbook HD was fine but it wouldn't mount but now it says there was an error and it cannot be repaired. I don't get it. So if its just the harddrive that needs to be replaced does it normally cost about $200 for parts & labor? Or can I do it myself? This ***.

Might just be a corrupted disk that can't be repaired. If it's beyond hope, you could always just reformat your drive (with a check for bad sectors) and install OSX from scratch.

I don't know what to say about your eMac, but the CD drive isn't made by Apple. It's likely from a major electronics manufacturer, and sometimes they do fail.

Yay! Add me to this list!

I bought my Macbook end of August 2007, directly from apple.ca So it's still under warranty. Thank Goodness.

It died tonight on me. It seemed to be working normally all day. I went to soccer practice, came home, opened it up. Annnddd it started clicking internally. Yay! So from reading what is being said on here. Sounds like my hard drive is completely dead. Gr. I've backed it up recently so thats not a HUGE problem. But what makes me upset is that I am going to school internationally on Friday, and this is absolutely fantastic to happen just before I leave. :\
Talk about timing.

I can't believe how many people are having the same problem. Apple needs to get their act together and let people know of this problem if they are unable to fix it! So buyers don't go into these HUGE purchases (and this was a huge purchase for me, being a student) completely blind!
They have an amazing product, operating system wise, BUT clearly they have major problems to deal with in regards to their hardware.

So now I'm looking forward to calling support tomorrow and hearing that I am going to have to ship it to them and blah blah blah. And therefore be computerless for school.

How long does this kind of repair take generally?

Thanks
Rachel

For Apple's statistical purposes, please add another one to the list. Seagate HDD failed in 14 month old MacBook. Looks like I'm not alone.

Wa-hay, looks like I'm the newest member of this fun club...
I don't seem to have the question mark, only a grey screen. Managed to run the CD but disk utility will not work, only sits there thinking and annoying me. Can't get anything else to work. I am in China so have no idea how to sort this out, apple have been very unhelpful on the phone. Stupidly have not backed anything up so have lost lots and lots of stuff...

Hi everyone!!
Deal me in!!
I just got my membership last night!!

I will see that seagate and raise ya one.

You can add yet another one to the list. My Macbook HD failed catastrophically about a month out of warranty with no warning. Thankfully I use it as a secondary machine so I didn't lose anything important, but after doing some searching on the topic I can't believe that Apple hasn't addressed it.

Add me to the list. Total data loss, in the middle of a PhD dissertation in the Caribbean. And get this - my last Time Machine backup was (unknowingly to me at the time) faulty!

I'm really angry about it at the moment.

8-month old MacBook hard drive totally died on me this past weekend.

(un)proud to be a member of this club.

Count me in too,

i recently had a services from apple as it did not boot after apple undate,
and last night it failed me again, and its 14days out of service warranty....
great... they want me to pay $99 just for inspection and extra for labour.

i guess i'll just have to let my mac sleep for a while...