Product key Windows activation client

droopsnoot

Any of those would do if the drive is OK. If it's just to retrieve data from it as a one-off, I used something like this http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-2-0-to-IDE-SATA-2-5-3-5-Hard-Drive-Converter-Cable-/290391686192?pt=UK_Computing_Drive_Cables_Adapters&hash=item439cb17c30#ht_2954wt_1005 which will work with IDE (older style) or SATA drives like yours. Mine came with a power supply but probably cost a bit more. There's not really anything in it, as I wanted to connect either type of drive the above cable made more sense for me.

I must admit I'm probably with the repairers on the swapping of the drive, now you've said it was dropped. Hard disks have very, very small tolerances internally and can be quite easily damaged, in ways that you cannot predict. But it wasn't handled very well if they didn't leave it in the same state it was before they did the swap. They may well not have been able to read the product key (you mentioned the label was quite poor or damaged) but should have considered that.

droopsnoot

macman wrote: »

If I take my car to the garage for a clutch change, do they then change the gearbox without asking me 'just in case'?

To be fair, that's not a good analogy. Hard drives are relatively delicate bits of kit, and an impact with a hard floor can have dire consequences involving the head hitting the media surface, which may not show up until some time in the future.

macman

droopsnoot wrote: »

To be fair, that's not a good analogy. Hard drives are relatively delicate bits of kit, and an impact with a hard floor can have dire consequences involving the head hitting the media surface, which may not show up until some time in the future.

But that doesn't justify changing it (and charging the insurers and thus indirectly the policy holders) just on the offchance. If it was tested and found to boot OK, then that's all that can be expected.

Nilrem

macman wrote: »

But that doesn't justify changing it (and charging the insurers and thus indirectly the policy holders) just on the offchance. If it was tested and found to boot OK, then that's all that can be expected.

Except that if it then fails, they have to fix it again.

My guess is they may have done basic diagnostics as standard, and those can show up a drive is "out of spec" long before it actually fails (if you're lucky - if you're unlucky the first thing you know about the drive having issues is when it doesn't work).

droopsnoot

To me, the cost of a drive would be outweighed by the time involved in doing any meaningful tests, at a minimum you'd want a read/write test over the entire drive with the associated backing up of any data there. But I haven't used any professional drive diagnostic tools (other than Spinrite, very briefly, some time ago) so I bow to those who have more current knowledge.

mttylad

Heck, why worry about it - if the insurance gave you a new drive (was it a bigger one too?) then you have a new drive for nowt.

Poppy9

My external case arrived and after 30 minutes trying to open it - OH had to use a sharp knife, we were in.

Fitted in drive and connected to lap top. Could see in my devices but not my computer. Googled and went right clicked on computer and "manage". Went to "storage", "disk management". Could see it was not initialized so right click to initialize and had error message.

Data error cyclic redundancy check!

Not sure what to do now!