Where’s my solid-state drive?

Talking to myself here, other than to remind everyone out there to go back up their hard drive. My MacBook hard drive failed catastrophically this morning. I need somewhere to post what I think was on there that I need to restore to somewhere else (or make peace with losing):

Adobe Creative Suite 1.1: reinstall from original disks
Toast: reinstall from original disks
MS Office: reinstall from original disks
PitStop Pro: need to find original disk
Firefox: redownload
GraphicConverter: redownload
OS 10.4: need to find original disks
TextWrangler: redownload

2007 income tax files: new plan: reinstall TT2007, reimport carry-forwards from 2006, redo totals on forms from 2007, and then everything that carries forward should do so correctly for 2008

photos: only missing about 200 photos

web bookmarks: nothing crucial
music: random downloads from musician’s sites, nothing crucial
work files: intermediate stages only, no active projects, so no big deal
web files: everything important is live on the server, and is now backed up to the iMac

Because I have access to customer credit card data from that laptop, I cannot have it fixed by Apple even though it’s under warranty because they won’t guarantee returning the original hard drive. That’s frustrating. Update: Apple is shipping me a replacement hard drive under warranty and has waived the requirement for the original hard drive to be returned. First-tier support was utterly useless (as always), but second-tier sorted it out in one phone call. I can either replace the drive myself or take it to an Apple Store and have them do it under warranty, and the paperwork is supposed to convince them not to keep the original hard drive. The second-tier rep understood that my situation is similar to a lawyer with client files that they cannot risk releasing. Someday Apple will understand that most people have private data on their hard drives, and will stop confiscating hard drives as a matter of routine. Even better, someday Apple will understand that most people have data they care about on their hard drives and make backups as drag-and-drop simple and reliable as they were under OS 9. (Time Machine is cute, but it’s not a real solution.) But then I should probably add a “daydream” tag to this post.