The Bad Hard Drive
July 26th, 2010Part of the return process involves running a diagnostic program on the bad hard-drive. Per their website, 20% of returned drives are actually bad. It would have been helpful if I read that part before purchasing a replacement drive, transferring the data to it and spending an additional two hours formatting data off the bad drive. I could fall within the 80% of the perceived faulty drives that are actually good.
After performing tests on the drive in question, the program refers me to a second diagnostic DOS based-program which is bootable from either a 3.25″ floppy drive (who still uses those?) or a CD.
The second diagnostic program displays details about the drive, but the menu items remain disabled and the mouse and keyboard stop working. That’s a small problem.
Arriving at a dead end, I include the test code from the first program in the hard-drive exchange request. They’ll send me a re-certified (refurbished) drive once they receive the bad one. I’ll use the replacement as a back-up drive. More on that later.