[Rumor]

As the title quickly states, that is pretty much what happened.

Yes, yes, I know. Back up, back up, back up. It was on my list of things to do, I just haven't done it yet. More pressing matters require my hard earned dollars currently.

Anyhow, I take my MBP in on the 18th to the local Apple store. I thought it may be firmware related, since it didn't happen until right after that. They agreed it may be possible and may be the logic board, but they wanted to look at the hard drive first. Fine with me. The symptom: boot to grey screen with a mouse cursor, but not able to boot off either partition.

I had an OSX and XP partition, most of my work is done via XP due to school and their love of ActiveX. I also game, so booting natively is the better option.

So I take it in, they say about a week. I am getting a bit impatient because my finals actually started last Sunday, and I asked for an extension, which gives me until this Thursday. The print out I received said 7 - 10 days, so calling on the 11th didn't seem pushy to me.

Let me go back a bit, when I dropped it off, the girl at the Genius Bar gave me two options: 1) Send it in, but if the HD failed, there would be no data recover. Return time four days. 2) Leave it there, but they would do data recovery. Return time a week. I went with option two obviously.

After calling this morning, I was told that I it was on the slate to have the HD swapped today and would receive a call.

I received the call later in the afternoon. They informed me that they replaced the HD, and it was running fine now.

I asked about data recovery. The guy said he must have read the repair order wrong, and give him a sec. Perhaps a minute passes, or two, he returns and says the drive is corrupted beyond their recovery abilities and suggests a third party data recovery service. The only real important thing I had on the XP side was a paper I working on, so thought nothing of it, picked up the MBP and continued on my way.

I get home to install the Bootcamp stuff and come to the realization that the beta I was using was supposed to expire when Leopard was released. My oversight for sure, but it made me think of a question:

Did they refuse to attempt data recovery knowing that I had an expired Bootcamp beta?

[dowNNshift]

A week?! That's absurd, we fix them next day. Apple is really good about shipping parts next day DHL. They just sat on your machine. Tsk, tsk lame-o Genius Bar....

Anyways, to answer your question -- Nope, if the header of the drive is corrupted, there truly is no way to recover the data without using a drive recovery company. Most technicians aren't gonna take the time to audit what is on your hard drive, unless they happen to come upon something totally illegal. What likely happened was as they said, they ran Disk Utility and the volume wouldn't mount or the Repair disk function couldn't repair the drive header.

I always hate having to tell customers that their data is lost, but ultimately its the customers responsibility to keep a current back up. The only time you'll get your physical drive back is after an out-of-warranty repair. In-warranty repairs Apple keeps the drives because they gotta claim warranty on the manufacturers.

Since you're starting off fresh, why not upgrade to Leopard and take advantage of Time Machine for the Mac side backup?