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Is a Mac (or Linux) really any better in this regard? I've only ever owned one, a pizza box OS8? I ditched it when it started booting with a sad face icon. Never managed to do anything except a clean re-install of the OS.


Classic Macs I can't really comment on as I don't have much repair experience. But OS X and Linux have a ton of great built in tools for troubleshooting and repairing issues with the filesystems. Generally, I have found I get to the problem much quicker in a Linux environment, because it doesn't try to obscure things behind the guise of "user friendliness". And while OS X has a pretty shell around it, getting to the unix underbelly is really easy.

Mark Lord and his kind in the Linux community deserve a lot of thanks for their work with these tools. Unless a hard drive is just completely gone, it is usually possible to recover from some serious issues without having to resort to padding the pockets of either a utility maker or drive recovery service.