Broken disk drive but don't want to return

Fosterdog

It's not at all ridiculous, OP said he worked in IT as if that made him more knowledgable in this situation. If he worked in an area of IT that had nothing to do with hard drives or hardware then why mention it at all in the first post.

Personally I would expect anyone working in any area of IT to know the basics of backup, hard drives and encryption even for software development and analysts.

earthstorm

I am a Web Host and this is classed as 'working in IT' but have no official hardware experience, although i can upgrade PC components and when one of my external HDD drives stopped being recognised by any of my PCs i decided nothing to lose by removing it from the case ( which needed to be broken as it was totally sealed), placed this in a spare slot on my main PC and straight away it was recognised by my PC, so now i have 2 internal HDD in my PC

timbstoke

Skipping past the whole "working in IT" argument and getting back on topic, you have 2 items which have value to you:

- A faulty drive
- Personal data

Your personal data is unrelated to the warranty, and is only relevant in the sense that you want to retain control of what happens to it. That's fine, but it means you need to make a choice: is the cost of the drive more important than the risk of your data being compromised?

If you're not prepared to release the drive, then you have no rights to any kind of remedy in law. That's where you stand in a nutshell.

DevCoder

You dont mention the exact model but the power on, spin, click loop is a common symptom of Seagates 7200.11 drives (which are fitted in a lot of NAS's and other portable backup caddies).

It's not actually a physical problem as such, the firmware gets corrupted by a single BSY "bit flag" getting set. On power/spin up the firmware reads this bit, decides it's a failure (due to it being busy) and cycles.

If it is a seagate 7200.11 then seagate can fix it for you for free, you can push them even if it's an OEM drive in the buffalo.

Reference links

http://support.seagate.com/firmware/fts_drive_check_en.html
or you can attempt the fix yourself, I've done this to a few drives
https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/

halibut2209

EDIT: Doesn't matter. It's a dead drive. Either send it back or lose the money

I'd recommend this though for the future

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Overcoming-Paranoid-Suspicious-Thoughts-Freeman/dp/1845292197

Hintza

Would they entertain sending it back to you after they have had a look, if you cover P+P?

custardy

chrisp030271 wrote: »

Well custardy you obviously move in far more tech-savvy circles than me. Most of the people I know (intelligent enough, just not that interested in IT) have trouble printing an email, never mind even thinking that they NEED to encrypt their home drives, never mind be able to DO it.

and on a counter argument
the majority fo less techy consumers would simply return the drive for replacement
You have fallen in the middle
techy enough to be aware of the data but not enough to have encrypted it

Nilrem

Hintza wrote: »

Would they entertain sending it back to you after they have had a look, if you cover P+P?

I doubt it.

It still needs to be accounted for in inventory, and unlike cheap bits, the likes of external HDD's tend to be expensive enough for most suppliers and manufacturers to require them to be returned for accounting purposes.

Not to mention parts of most drives can be repurposed by the manufacturer, so a "dead" drive has value for it's parts which can be used to refurb other units.
IE if the drive controller fails on a drive, the manufacturers tests will let them know that, they can then run the mechanical side on a test unit, put a replacement control board on from a drive with a dead mechanical unit, and recertify it (part of that will involve wiping any data on it - assuming the change of control board doesn't make the data unreadable*)..


As for worries about sending a drive back to the manufacturer - they don't give a flying figgin about what's on it (and if it's unreadable on more than one PC, it's quite unlikely an opportunist is going to bother spending the time on it**).
They'll be receiving hundreds or thousands of drives back a week (minimum), and their entire system is based around automating the returns process.
They'll generally connect it up to a test rig (that probably doesn't require any human intervention other than to physically connect/disconnect it), and that'll run a series of tests to decide if it's a physical problem (IE disk motor/tracking failed etc), or a controller issue etc.

Now if I was sending it back to a small company, or PC World and it was readable, I might be slightly worried, but the likes of Amazon will likely just forward it to the manufacturer.


*IIRC some hard drives now put some of the "control" information on the disc itself, rather than just in the firmware on the board, not to mention the manufacturers recertification process normally involves things like reading/writing to the entire disc a couple of times.

**Unlike if, say the op is a well known author, or works for someone like Apple etc and the drive is sent from a known address, in which case it could potentially be targeted (one of the reasons some companies just destroy failed drives, or run them through industrial demagnetisers).

bod1467

4771_Miles_To_Caracas wrote: »

Contact local PC repair companies, some of them will have degaussing facilities, for a small fee you can get your hard drive magnetically wiped before you return it to Amazon.

Hence the "strong magnet" comment earlier in this thread.

fridge_raider

Fosterdog wrote: »

All you need is a caddy or another external drive to act as a caddy, you can pick them up for £5, I keep one in the cupboard for when I need it.

For someone who works in IT you really don't seem to have any clue at all about these things. You don't need to be a hard dive specialist to know this stuff it is the most basic IT hardware knowledge. If I were your employer I'd have serious concerns over your ability to do your job if you find such simple and basic tasks to be above your level of expertise.

How rude are you mate? Unbelievable. This person has come on here to open a discussion on what seems to me to be a very valid consumer issue and you're questioning his ability to do his job? It's not even relevant, and you don't know the first thing about him. I'd have been absolutely fuming if I was him .