As a sidenote, the Contact Apple Support page has a place where you can type in your mac serial number to find out if your machine is covered. For kicks I typed in my MBP serial number and they had the purchase date wrong and said it wasn’t covered! It took another 20 minutes on the phone to get that fixed…..

There is no lolipop, no free software, no replacement machine, no free upgrade, no even coupons for music from the stupid iTunes Music Store … just a promise that in *two weeks* I will have my machine back again without this stupid and highly annoying broken fan noise.

I like to giggle and think about what Steve Jobs would do if this kind of thing happened to his Mac Book Pro. I can’t even begin to describe it … this is a family website :-) Suffice to say he would be really, really, really mad.

Lesson Learned: after installing new RAM, always run Apple Hardware Test (by inserting the restore CD and holding down the “D” key). It also seems like a good idea to run AHT when you get random filesystem corruption. I thought it was the hard drive but in fact I think what happened was HFS blocks were read into RAM, got corrupted, and then written back out to disk….

AppleCare Support Step 1: “That’s not a hardware problem. That’s definitely a software problem.”
AppleCare Support Step 2: “OK, that’s a hardware problem, but you have been abusing your machine! Your warranty is now void.”

Copying this partition with normal Un*x tools like cat or dd will fail, as those tools abort on error. dd_rescue instead will try to read and if it fails, it will go on with the next sectors. The output file naturally will have holes in it, of course. You can write a log file, to see, where all these errors are located.

This is the third time that I’ve had to send my machine in to Apple for repair. I called to check on the status, and it was ‘on hold’. They were not repairing it because they needed some information from me. Hmmm.. Apple Repair has my MBP, what information could I give them? I eventually got connected to someone who could tell me what was going on, and she informed me that when they took the machine apart, they found it had been taking apart before! And that it was missing some screws and maybe something was cut! And this was abuse! Apple wanted to know if it was I who had taken apart and abused the laptop.

No, I said. This is the third time I’ve sent this machine to Apple for repair. Apple is the only one that has taken my machine apart. Apple abused my laptop! Yes, she says, I see you’ve sent in your machine three times this year, so I will write down it was damaged by Apple repair.

Wait, if my machine keeps breaking, and you say it is because Apple Repair has been abusing my laptop, shouldn’t you send me a new one, instead of the same broken one you keep sending me?

Need to talk to someone else… wait on hold… new guy says nope. This is decided on a case-by-case basis. So you aren’t going to replace my macbook that was abused by people at applecare? Nope! So how many times do I have to send it in before it qualifies for a replacement. “Sometimes five… sometimes eight.. it depends”. Well, I’ve had five different problems, with five different case numbers. “No sir. Maybe if you have to send it in again”.

“So, to clarify, Apple will not replace a MacBook Pro that has been abused by other Apple technicians who previously repaired the laptop.”

“That is correct.”

Merry Christmas from Apple!!

2/17 purchase
5/23 first mail-in
6/06 second mail-in (they sent it back with a 100GB drive that only formated to 30GB, which was the problem I complained about. They replaced the logic board, though.)
7/11 battery ballooned up and would no longer fit
11/3 power supply melted
12/19 sent in. Apple says that they found screws missing and physical damage from a previous repair. Classifies this as abuse, but won’t replace laptop.

They still have the laptop, and the repair status is still ‘on hold’. Who knows when I’ll get it back, but they aren’t trying to repair it. Maybe tomorrow they will start…

But perhaps that is just a pathelogical case due to bad hardware. This morning I’m getting the same HFS file corruption as I was before, even though there is a brand new Seagate drive in my MBP. Very interesting…..