Hard Drive Failure, New Drive Won't Install

Like many others here, my seagate hard drive failed. After driving two hours to the Apple store in Orlando, FL they told me that they didn't have any appointments for the day. I waited around to see if anyone cancelled and luckily after and hour and a half they agreed to see me. Told me my hard drive was toast, they would replace it (I could come back in 4 fours and pick it up), but wouldn't give me my old one back to try and have info recovered, so I left with my non working macbook. All in All I was VERY dissapointed with my first Apple store experience!!
I placed a call to see what recovery cost, and was informed anywhere from 500 to 3,000 dollars, depending on how much information they recovered. I don't have the money for that, so I just stopped at Circuit City on the way and purchased a new 160GB WD hard drive. When I pulled the old HD out the little rubber rail on the side came out with it. It took me many times to keep the flexible rail in place while sliding the new HD in to get it where I think that it is mating up properly. When I put everything back together and boot while holding the C key, I still get the flashing folder with a question mark.
Someone Please HELP Me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Message was edited by: cahileman

farshid wrote:
Yes indeed, and I do back up, but just not the most recent data. This is not about Apple or anybody being responsible for lost data in un backed up drives, it is about them caring about the customers enough to let them know they have are looking into an issue with their defective seagate drives, and there is a potentially higher risk than usual in the meantime. Classic case of protecting themselves more at the expense of their customers.
I understand. My guess (just speculation) is that Apple and Seagate are negotiating right now over this. I wouldn't necessarily expect the customer service employees of Apple to know the inner workings of the legal and business team or to be apprised of it until there is a resolution between Apple and Seagate.
Most users don't have an IT department at home, or a nightly backup strategy/capability. I back up my data weekly or more often given the nature of the data I have. Going forward I would like to do what you do. How do I make and maintain a bootable clone of my hard drive without spending hours a day?
Set up a RAID configuration with an external hard drive. All data would be simultaneously mirrored to the redundant hard drive. I've never done it, but I hear it's not that bad.

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