[josiahpugh]

My IBM DeskStor 48GB for my PowerBook G4 crashed and burned. The local Apple people can't fix it and my warranty just ran out! Does anybody know if there was possibly a recall or a way I can get a new hard drive without having to shell out big bucks? Possibly a warranty of the hard drive itself even though it came from Apple?

[xtro]

It's with an A.

Credit card purchase? Most will double the warranty for you...

[The Placid Casual]

Ah, the curse of the 'DeathStar' strikes again...

They are all imfamous. One model a good few years ago, failed in such prolific numbers they were nicknamed the 'Deathstars'... You had more chance of getting a bad one than good.

Recall, man, I would decommission them all. They have the worst reputation of any drives in the history of Hard Drives. Hell, they have the worst reputation of any data storage device since our ancestors wrote things on rocks.

Lots of people the world over really, really hate IBM drives...

On a practical level, I would call IBM and see what they say, they often offer longer warranties on products when sold as components, don't now if it applies to OEM supplied parts though... worth a try.

How old is the drive?

[tooki]

Wait wait wait. Is this an internal drive in the PowerBook? In that case it's a Travelstar, not a DeskStar. (BTW, the extent of DeskStar failures is far less-reaching than some people think... it basically affected one size of one model, and only the ones manufactured in one factory. Hungary, I think.)

Anyway, even if the PowerBook is out of warranty, the drive itself might not be. It does not hurt to put in a warranty RMA request with IBM (well, HGST now).

At Mac shops I've worked at, we've gotten free drive replacements for clients this way many times. Just because Apple's warranty has run out doesn't mean that the hard drive OEM's has.

Of course, last year, they started putting 1 year warranties on new IDE drive models.

tooki