Ok, cool, last mail, thanks for all support.

I'll need a solid state replacement 1.8inch, at most 5mm high, PATA, ZIF connector, if anandtech is right. Cheapest I found so far is 32GB, around 1000 USD. Any referal to any good reseller in Germany/the Netherlands would be appreciated. I might go SSD.

I'll reinstall Fedora Life 11 over the trashed drive and see if I can make it work without swap, or memory mounted swap. The smartctl monitor gives failures everywhere, so I am pretty sure the thing is trashed.

Does CF give decent read/write speeds? I don't care a lot because otherwise I'll just use it as a portable X-terminal at home and configure another machine as development server.

Thanks, will let you know if it worked or the MacBook turned into flames.