It looks as though my diligence has paid off since a lawyer took me up on investigating a classaction laws suit against Fujitsu for producing faulty hard drives.
The law firm has put up a web page http://www.classactioncounsel.com/fujitsu-litigation.htm for all fuji customers to submit data to.
Please let everyone you know who has had a Fuji HD fail about this page. Maybe we can get something back from Fu-shit-su.