Anyway, here is something you may want to check when buying a new drive:
I remember Seagate, Hitachi and a few others had quite long warranties on their drives (at no extra cost if it wasn’t bought as OEM) – up to 3 years. You look up the drive’s serial number online, file a RMA request, send them the defective drive and they mail you a new drive and all you pay is postage. I did that a few times with desktop drives when they died on me and I remember a few manufacturers also offer this sort of warranty for their mobile HDDs.

Good Luck

remove the 2 sticks of ram and swap their slots

you may be right. I may give old steve@apple.com a ring.

@David

Yes, that’s true – I do have a first gen Mac Mini – it’s rough using it because its so darn slow, but I do have it.

If you’re only three weeks out of warranty and this is a known issue with the hard drives (it would seem so), start working your way up the food chain with Apple Customer Care/Support or whatever they call it.

They should still take care of this for you because of the nature of the problem and the fact that you had symptoms before your warranty expired. It’s too bad you didn’t actually call in or have it checked before it ran out, but if you stand strong and insist that they do something they likely will.

Just remember to be polite and courteous. When and if you don’t hear what you need to hear, simply ask to speak with that individual’s manager and keep moving up the chain of command as necessary.

Good luck!

I bought AppleCare if it was to make sure i never have trouble with my MBP.

The next step would be #1 Johns idea of a bootable volume. You can then repair the disk if you had errors.

Personally I would never look at the forums. They always tend to be wrong, and a handful of people blow things way out of proportion from what a few million people experience.

The support ran out 3 weeks ago.

@Everyone

Apple wants to charge me over $900 to replace my hard drive.

Tech Restore, on the other hand, will not only replace, but upgrade the hard drive for $199 for a 160 Gb hard drive, $279 for a 250 Gb hard drive, and $329 for a 350 Gb hard drive.

I literally couldn’t help but laugh at the Apple support guy when he said $900. That’s insane.

That’s exactly what’s going on. I am screwed.

I cheaped out and didn’t get AppleCare.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=960977&start=0&tstart=0

One can not just simply “go out and get a new one” when you’re talking about a $2000+ computer.

@Michael

You “just” upgraded to Leopard, so it’s not a case of needing a clean install. Unless you did an upgrade. You could try a clean install, but I doubt that is it. Unless, like I said, you did an upgrade from Tiger.

Have you tried the diagnostic utlity on the Leopard DVD?

If you think your hard drive is faulty, or dying a slow death, then maybe this is a good oppurtunity to upgade to a larger hard drive. OWC (macsales.com) has good prices.

Since you’re out of warranty, did you buy Apple care? If so, you could do another 4 hours in the car and take it to the Apple Store and see if a Apple is willing or able to do some kind of motherboard diagnostic. If you explain all the problems you’ve been having then maybe they will replace the machine. (If you have Apple Care, that is.)

Memory could be getting flakey.
HD could be going bad.

They look much the same. To eliminate the HD issue, get a new firewire box drive and install a clean OS on that, add your apps, and see how it works for a few days. If the problem(s) go away, it is your internal disk and replacement will solve your problems long term.

If they don’t go away, get new memory (just one stick), remove your existing memory, put in the new stick and run for a few days. If the problem goes away then you have a memory issue, and you can test the other 2 sticks (one at a time) with the new one. When the problems re-appear, you have found the back stick.

If this doesn’t solve your problems, then as Cameron has mentioned the new MacBook(Pro) may be your solution.