My faithful MPB, on which I do all of my source code development and photo processing went to sleep and never woke up. And, like most people, its been much too long since my last backup! The source code was safe, as it was all stored on a source code repository, but my photo editing data was on the hard drive. 

Under normal circumstances, I'd be panicked, however, I was confident that the data on my hard drive was safe, and that the problem lie in the logic board (motherboard). So how to get my data back? Why with an Apple version of the Vulcan mind-meld:

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My wife was generous enough to offer her MBP as the vessel into which my hdd would temporarily reside while I sent my macbook off for repair, which could take several weeks. The ability to move a hard drive from one macbook to another, which is 2 years older, is a procedure that would be utterly impossible if this was a PC. Unless the two notebooks are exactly identical, moving hard drives from one to the other is a fool's errand. The driver clash would just blow that instance up. Moving back would be just as improbable. The mac? No problem. It didn't so much as open a single warning dialog when I booted my drive on her older MBP!

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The process of swapping hdd's was easy and took a matter of 30 minutes to do.

So essentially I'm back to work without missing a beat, though the wife is annoyed that she's minus a notebook for the duration.