HDD failed - RMA questions

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plinx0r

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 25, 2002
Messages
204
I came home tonight to find my brand new Seagate 7200.10 320gig drive making these awful sounds. It sounded like someone was running a nail across a chalkboard. I instantly checked the event viewer and found tons of errors and warnings. So I powered down for a while and booted back up only to hear the drive trying to spin up but having trouble doing so because of the nail-like sound. BIOS won't detect the drive so of course windows won't either; tried on multiple PCs.

My question is: I have my life on this drive (documents/pictures/music) and I'm curious as to how RMAs are handled by Newegg when they receive a dead drive. Are they just tossed in a bin and disposed of or do they attempt some sort of recovery and sell them as open box?

In case you can't tell I'm rather paranoid that my documents will be recovered by someone snooping around on the drive. Maybe they'd get lucky and the drive would work for them. Any insight?
 
I highly doubt they will be snooping around your documents as that is an invasion of privacy. I do not know the routine they use to determine dead hard drives or how they dispose of them, but I think you are safe with all your documents.

If you are really paranoid, run Dban on it and see if you can erase the drive before you send it in for a RMA.
 
As long as hdd is still spinning and working, DBan can wipe it so do this before shipping. I know this since I work in the justice system and we are paranoid about shipping defective disks with confidential stuff.

We have money so those who are unrecoverable and unable to be wiped will get a bench drill treatement for lots of fun. However, most places will rarely snoop on them and they will return to the manufacturer and they will dispose of them properly 99% of the times.
 
A suggestion: don't just replace the drive, look into why it failed. Check your power supply using a voltmeter - is it producing the proper voltages? How's your cooling for the drive area?
 
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