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I know you will have been on tenterhooks to hear about my poor, nearly-dead MacBook. Did I mention that her name is Flora (as in Flora MacDonald, who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie)? Anyway, I took Flora to the Apple Store Genius Bar yesterday – what a wash-out. They do not concern themselves with data recovery, and simply told me what I already knew: that you can no longer “see” Flora’s hard drive to read from it. Was it the hard drive, or the reading mechanism, or the reading software, I asked – but they didn’t know and (I felt) didn’t care. Inspiration struck and I asked a Maccy neighbour for a recommendation, and he suggested going to see a local chap who rejoices in the (business) name of Zippin Pippin. I had an appointment with him this morning, and he couldn’t have been more encouraging and sympathetic.
Flora herself can be saved: the hard drive (of which more in a minute) will be replaced, her RAM increased, her vents dusted and all manner of beautification and pampering undertaken to restore her to glory – hurrah! She also received lots of compliments on her appearance and the great care that has been taken of her. So Flora will live to write another book. Here she is on arrival at hospital.
The hard drive, on the other hand, is significantly buggered: it’s a mechanical failure such that the disk does not turn and so cannot be read. Thankfully Zippin Pippin is obsessed with data recovery and has vowed to work on it night and day, deploying all of his skills (including freezing the disk) to recover my errant chapter and a half. So I am more optimistic than I have been for some time, but everything is still crossed. I’ll keep you posted. Worst case scenario is that the data is truly gone and I’ll have to do some re-writing, but I have allowed time for that and should still meet my beta reader delivery date of this coming Thursday – eeek!
Susan Grossey 
Hi Susan
Glad to hear that you are back safely in the UK and that you have found a caring soul to try and rescue the data from Flora’s hard drive. I’m sure that, with their apparent lack of care, it was a very frustrating trip to the “Genius Bar”. As you will know all too well, there is often a world of difference between the hard working self employed (who will generally pay far more attention to their customers) and the all powerful big businesses, who somehow seem to lose touch with the need to keep their customers at the heart of everything they do.
Fingers crossed that Zippin Pippin can rescue the missing data for you.
Best wishes
Graham
Hi Graham
You are so right: the Apple Store is now about style rather than substance. They were not at all interested in repair or preservation – simply in sales. Lesson learnt: I will always try to use local businesses when I can.
Best wishes from Susan