Macbook (first batch) Dead Hard Drive

Question

Hi all,
i checked the search feature but didn't find too many instances, i have a first batch Macbook (May 2006) and so does my friend. He's had on going problems such as the fan problem and Logic board problem and his hard drive just went out today. But i've been somewhat lucky up until last week my hard drive just died, it went to sleep mode then all of a sudden froze, when i restarted it it just showed the Question mark.
I've tried all options such as, Option, Apple, P&R, as well as taking the battery out and holding down the power button, i can hear clicking noises but it wont read the hard drive, just the Question mark. i've loaded the hardware test and it finds no problems, as well as disk utilities but no luck there it won't even recognize the hard drive and only sees the optical drive.
Macbook   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   1gb memory

Answer 1

First off, look at Terms of Use of this board. You can't post polls.
Secondly, hard drives can fail at anytime and for any reason. That does not have anything to do with whether or not the hard drive is a good batch or not, but merely because of the technology. Even though Maxtor's lineup of hard drives supposedly improved since their bad batch early this decade, my 500 GB hard drive from Maxtor died after 9 months, and that was a desktop hard drive!
This is why I strongly recommend anyone using computers to backup their data as my FAQ explains:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
As for your AppleCare won't talk with you, I don't believe it.
Edit: If you paid $250 to extend it, you should contact them and tell them that you did. Get your receipt for where you paid for it, and ask them to get you registered. As long as you bought it before the year was out, you should be able to have authorized.
If you didn't get it until after the year is out, you are out luck there, but AppleCare telephone calls usually only cost a $50 per incident fee that lasts about a week. That's why they ask for your credit card number. To ensure your call is covered under the same incident when you call back, be sure at the beginning of your call to get a case number established once you give them your credit card number.
Hard drives on notebooks are particularly succeptable to failure because of the heat inside the machines, the movement put through when the machine is in use, and their smaller parts. I strongly recommend that anyone using a notebook to at least shut down their machine before moving it off a desk for any period of time. The movement in a car or bus has such jarring motion from speed bumps and pot holes it can kill a hard drive quicker if the machine is up and running. And running into doorjams can do the same.
As for the slowdown in your machine, you may have too full a hard drive, a machine which needs the nightly scripts run, or one of these other issues my FAQ discusses:
http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html
Ask before you do any maintenance.