Figures this wasn't over yet... I had no problems returning the two bad purchases... But yesterday I discovered that the 40GB drive I used to test that USB enclosure was also killed. Completely dead. Not even the faintest of sounds when connecting it to its normal Firewire enclosure.

But the worst news... I had been using the PowerBook without incident since this happened. Including this afternoon at work where I first paired it to a new Logitech MX900 Bluetooth mouse. Tonight when I got home I had to pair the mouse again because I had replaced the batteries and might have reset the connect button. While fiddling with the Bluetooth settings in Mac OS X the machine hung (actually it hung while searching for the mouse while I was busy flipping a pork tenderloin on the BBQ).

...So I had to press the power button to shut it down. Starting it back up and.... it won't boot. Can't find the bootable partition. Boot with the install/recovery disk and there's no HD to be found. Not an unrecognised partition, nothing. Simply no HD detected to even try a repair or diagnostic on. Clearing NVRAM/settings with keyboard shortcut and OpenFirmware didn't change this. Can't hear any sound from the HD when powering up machine.

Fun fun fun. Since I had to go to a service center anyway, I guess it's better it happened now and not next week. shite. Even though I can easily re-install the stuff on the HD if I lose it, I did put a bit of original work on there. Glad I haven't cleared my camera's flash card though (that would have been about 200MB of images lost which would have been the icing on the cake).

This is not my week.
Bruno