Sorry you've had a bad run at the Apple world, both from weak
hardware and blundering support. My own experience with the genius
bar and warranty service has been more positive but I'm in Seattle
and I had a simpler problem.
I find the Apple support a little like some kind of military
procedure. One must first go through step A, which is usually going
through a troubleshooting phase with someone in India to be certain
it isn't a silly user error or something correctable via standard
software utilities, and at the end of that Apple gives out a number.
The Indian guy, or whatever, logs this number and the troubleshooting
steps he went through so that the next guy in the process doesn't
need to repeat it all. In the end there is often some kind of
warranty replacement, which can involve being deprived of your
machine for a week or two, but rarely any extensive data retrieval or
tedious hunt for cheaper ways to fix things or find out why they went
bad.
John was right in suggesting the firewire boot as a possible way to
get some data back. Disk Warrior is also very handy there. But actual
data recovery, which is the kind of thing they do in clean rooms with
drives that have gone to the bottom of the Holiday Inn swimming pool,
that's an expensive proposition. It usually involves opening the
drive itself and reading each sector and trying to reassemble the
data into files that can be read. Expect to pay as much as your iBook
cost for this.
I rather like taking stuff apart, but that's not everyone's cup of
tea. So I guess I don't have as many problems with Apple. I also kind
of expect life to toss a turd in my general direction, deprive me of
use of something or rob me regularly, so I'm not floored when I get a
flat tire or my iPod dies. It's a philosophical position. Life offers
very few guarantees, so when any company agrees to fix it's stuff I'm
pleasantly surprised.
Hope that firewire boot helps somewhat.
JS
On Oct 9, 2005, at 10:18 AM, Tobias Strohe wrote:
Dear Listas/essas,
I have been lurking mostly, but recent events warrant some verbage. I
apologize right away, if (when) this gets lengthy.
On my annual vacation this year my Powerbook G4 died (with some 500
not-yet-backed-up photos on it). Here is my story to this point and my
request for help:
1. Powerbook died and won't go beyond a grey backlit screen on startup
2. took it to "Gravis" in Cologne, Germany (great place!, competent,
helpful 'Apple Service Provider' like we used to have here). They
put in
a system disk and confirmed my suspicion that the Hard Drive has died
(it had been getting progressively slower on startup).
3. After return home this week I went to the local Apple Store and
they
informed me I needed to get an appointment to speak to a "genius" and
that the genius bar was closed for the day (this was Friday night).
4. I called 1-800-APL-CARE on Saturday morning (one: it hung up on me
after about 5 mins of the 8 mins announced (max) wait time; two: after
15 minutes waittime of 10 mins announced (max) I got Eric, who
requested
I insert a system disk and wouldn't believe the description of
above No.
2.) - I could not find my system disk other than an old X.1 which he
deemed not an option since I was last running X.3.9 ... After my
request
was denied to connect me to a repair dispatch to determine whether
there
is a way to obtain the damaged Hard Drive for Data recovery, I gave up
and decided to go back to the Apple Store.
5. Went to the Apple Store on Saturday AM, signed up for an
appointment
with a genius, got a pager (this alone took 10 to 15 minutes, although
the genius bar was not apparently busy) - the appointment was showing
11:30 (about 1 hour after my arrival), but I got buzzed at 11:10 (most
people are probably not patient enough to wait too long and I was to
find out immediately why:
6. The genius I spoke with mentioned that my only option for data
recovery would be to pay them 150 USD to remove and replace the
damaged
drive after a week where I could have it for data recovery and then
send
it in to Apple for replacement. Asked whether they could not put a new
drive in at that point he informed me that it needed to be an Apple
certified part and they could not obtain that. This is where the story
ends (for now).
Some additional information:
12" PB G4 (bought from Apple refurb), 1 Ghz, 768 MB RAM, Superdrive,
Airport Extreme, unit has been in my possession for about 1.5 years, I
do have Applecare 3 year extension
Some general venting: If Apple wants to get out of their low market
share they need to improve their service to what it used to be. Don't
hire arrogant, half-wits as geniusses, and phone line support (the
'genius' actually told me he had gotten yelled at over his comments
before - not that it helped, and I couldn't waste more time or energy
with him ;-). Don't design otherwise beautiful hardware with
components
that fail within 2 years (while I was at the 'genius' bar there were 2
other people with powerbook hard drive failure experience (and there
were not very many people to begin with). If I want this kind of
lack of
performance I can buy a Dell or another Sony (office experience with
Sony support on Vaio laptops is about on-par with current Apple). Will
we ever get another Powerbook G3 Kanga quality from Apple again? (my
1998 one is still going strong - now has a self-installed 20 Gig HD,
although I may need to solder the power connector for a short soon).
Any help, comments, different opinions/experiences, etc. are very
welcome,
tobias
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