After four years faithful service the HD in my old iBook has finally given up the ghost.The problem is that I'm still on holiday and I had three days of photos that I'd downloaded off the camera but not uploaded to my linode box.

So I booked an appointment at the Genius bar in Las Vegas. I explained my predicament to the Genius, he tried booting off a firewire drive but the machine still locked up when trying to access the drive. In the end we booted it into Firewire target mode and he left me in a corner with a spare macbook to copy off the files onto a flash disc.

Total cost to me, 1x 8Gb flash disc, $45. Getting my photos back while the drive still spins up, priceless.

Try doing that with a Dell....