http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=replacing+a+disk+in+a+MacBook&btnG=Google+Search

I dunno about Torx, I replaced the disk in my dotter’s ibook with a standard Philips. Ditto when I bought a Dell D830 in August, I immediately swapped out the 80g drive for a 250g drive using a Philips, a rusty spoon, chewing gum, and duct tape. (well, just kidding about the chewing gum.)

Here’s a 250g Samsung 2.5″ SATA drive at Newegg for $150:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152094

Smaller disks are cheaper roughly in proportion to capacity.

Or you can go to a vendor who specializes in Mac hardware like macsales.com, I’ve had good experience with them over the years. You’re likely to get better hand-holding for a Mac from them, should you need handholding.

Buying a disk from Apple (or Dell, or IBM/Lenovo) is a sucker’s game.. you not only pay for the disk, you pay thru the nose for Apple’s “certification”, which is meaningless.

The two points to check are 1) whether the laptop uses ATA (aka PATA) or SATA, you can find that by looking at the details in “About this computer” IIRC (if the machine is less than two years old, it’s almost certainly SATA); 2) laptop drives are 2.5″ so you’ll be way disappointed if you buy a 3.5″ drive, despite the lower price.

Also Apple uses the same components everyone else does these days, and has for years. When you consider that you get a lot more software packaged with the Mac, it’s not obvious that a Mac isn’t cheaper than a comparably performing Wintel box. (And these days you can run Mac OS X on a standard Wintel box if you’re not too finicky about legalities.)

Incidentally, there are tools which predict imminent disk failure. Not very well, but better than nothing. Dunno what the tools are called on Apple, but it’s the SMART disk interface standard.

The dirty little secret of laptops is that a $1.50 torx screwdriver from Sears and a tape-apart PDF scavenged off eMule will guide you through replacing or upgrading most plug-in components of a laptop. E.g., the difference between an expensive model and a cheap model is often just the amount of installed ram and the size of the drive, and the difference can be wildly greater the difference in the costs of those purchased separately.

Any decent-sized computer parts store will sell a doohicky that enables connecting a laptop drive to the IDE chain of a tower system (such as a used G3 blue-and-white or G4 gray-and-white, which you can snap up for less than a hundred), permitting you to diagnose and recover the drive that way. There’s also a utility (the name escapes me) which enables you to fully back-up a MacOS volume *from that drive to another while it is running* (a la Acronis True Image for PCs).

As always in these cases, Google is your friend to saving big-time cash and aggravation.

Also, if you have a reasonably modern MBP (you didn’t say what model you have), that Apple rep is even more of an idiot - there are built in “rapid motion detectors” that are designed to park the drive heads if the machine undergoes rapid acceleration (e.g., falls). Plus, the feature has enabled folks to write lots of fun, useless software like marble games and software seismographs.

Daveadams: That’s odd. My MBP (17″) DVD drive is really quiet. The fans are rather loud when decoding/playing a DVD, but that’s to be expected, given the processor involved and density of the machine. (which is my only real complaint with the machine - DVDs, Photoshop, Mathematica, Aperture, etc. can all quickly bring the machine to ~80C, making it too hot for my lap. Otherwise, it is the best laptop I’ve ever had, and well worth the Apple price premium.) I wonder if they switched drive manufacturers at some point.

In a couple years’ time most laptop “hard drives” will be solid state memory (Apple’s likely releasing a machine with such a drive next year, and other vendors already sell them) and we can put this era of unreliable storage behind us.

Oh, and @Jaisn, I just got a Macbook Pro from work (it runs Windows Vista really well!) and my DVD drive also sounds like a paper shredder. I assume it’s standard. I was really disappointed with the DVD drive after all the slot-loading love. I expect the disc to get grabbed much sooner than it does.

Spinrite has long been a fine product for windows, but the single best hard drive recovery app for MacOS is DiskWarrior from AlSoft. Al Whipple knows more about drives than anyone I’ve ever met. His app recovers more from corrupted drives than any other app I’ve seen. It’s usually available on the shelf at the apple store.

For replacing the drive itself, see iFixit.com for a step-by-step walkthrough and see if you feel up to doing what it says.

Doubly so, since your flaw drew the standard anti-Apple trolls with their supremely clever “ZOMG, An Apple Broke? NO WAI!” remarks.

There is something about the Apple cult. I had one IPod the simply stopped working and its replacement had to be replaced because of the cracked screen problems. That is a crappy product.

It seems that the main difference between Apples and Windows clones now is that the owner of the latter know that they are overpriced and unreliable whereas the owners of the former don’t.

(P.S. This was written on a MacBook pro.)

You should be able to get a SATA notebook Hard Drive for MUCH less than $289.00.

1) All drives are g-shock rated to something. All maxtor laptop drives are rated to 250g for 2ms while operating. That’s something like a 4′ fall onto a concrete floor.

2) the original iPod had a mechanical hard drive in it for storage.

So, it’s patently absurd to claim that typing on the computer while having it in your lap is the likely reason the drive went bad. These drives are designed to work while moving around.

And, nearly $300 for a new drive is obscenely high, even if they do install it, and transfer the data, they must be charging somewhere near $150-$200/hr for the service.

Really.

But as someone else stated, data corruption doesn’t necessarily equal dead HDD. A lot of newer laptops (yes, laptops) like the IBM Lenovo T60 my company assigns me have accelerometers in them so that if it’s moving too much it lifts the heads from the drive. I could have sworn Apples from the past few years had that too.

$289 to put in a new HD, geeze.