lost everything, macbook and its HD broken.

[Bill Marriott]

Andre,

People have given some excellent advice here. I just want to underscore some 
of the items and give you a couple additional ones:

1) The weird noise may not be a physical failure of the hard disk. A bad 
controller or motherboard can instruct the hard disk to do unnatural things. 
You also mentioned something about the motherboard being replaced. The very 
cheapest thing to do is to yank that hard drive out of the Mac and put it 
into a USB/Firewire housing. They cost as low as $14 mail order and no more 
than $45 for the top-of-the-line models. There are two advantages to getting 
a housing:

- You can try to boot from the drive using a borrowed Mac.
- You can attach it to a working Mac (or even PC) to have someone try to get 
the data off it.

I wouldn't let that MacBook talk to that hard disk anymore. Yank the HD out 
(well, carefully) and try getting it to mount on a known-good computer.

2) As someone mentioned before, don't let Apple get their hands on the 
drive. Like all manufacturers, they are a component-swap shop, not a hard 
drive recovery service. Sending it to Apple is one way to make sure you data 
goes bye-bye.

3) I'm sure just about anyone here would be willing to help you try to get 
your data back; let me add my name to the list.

4) I'm not sure how big your disk is, but an 80GB 3.5-in drive is about $45 
and the external USB/Firewire housing for them is about another $20. (Check 
newegg.com out.) For $65 you get a pretty amazing external backup solution. 
Usually plenty of space for your data (you don't need to back up system 
software and applications that come on CD). You don't need one of those 
fancy pre-built external things; it's super easy to build your own.

5) Dreamhost may not be the ideal ISP but the reason I kept them is they 
give me 400GB of storage and 4TB of transfer, which increases weekly by 
2GB/32GB, for $20/month (or much less if you prepay). They don't mind if you 
back up your drive to their servers, in fact they have a knowledgebase 
article on how to do it. What a huge peace of mind to have your files on a 
server that is offsite, redundant drives, air conditioned, UPS backed up, 
accessible from anywhere in the world, etc. (And they have improved their 
throughput and reliability a LOT since the summer.)


Good luck!



"Andre Garzia" <soapdog at mac.com> wrote in message 
news:8C7B763E-3A7D-4BDF-9FBF-D0A626B05D3D at mac.com...
> Friends,
>
> I was here coding some AJAX programs and developing libraries, my  macbook 
> just made a strange mechanical noise and then it was dead...  when tried 
> to boot, it made lots of mechanical noises and it never  booted again. The 
> noises are comming from the hard drive. I am  assuming I lost everything. 
> all my source code for the last year and  everything I was working. I 
> don't know what is broken... but I can't  make it boot even from CDs...
>
> I don't know what I am to do now. I am writting from my old G4. I was 
> doing some contract work and then it broke. The machine is now  bricked. 
> Can't boot from HD, Firewire, Network or CD, I've tried them  all. The 
> screen goes white, lot's of bad noises and the famous  question mark of 
> "no system folder". I can't even erase the PRAM...  never chimes.
>
> sorry for this annoucement but it will be a while till I set  everything 
> up again. Tomorrow I'll go to apple repair service but  they are making a 
> fool of me for more than three months already. I  was waiting for a 
> replacement main board for this same machine. Now  it appears, I'll need a 
> new machine.
>
> My backup machine was broken some months ago, I had no money to buy  the 
> parts to build it up again. The G4 had no space for hosting the  macbooks 
> backup. I think I just lost all my revolution source code  which was maybe 
> 5 or 6 gb worth of code.
>
> andre
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