<p>The period key didnt work and the power plug was occasionally loose in the power port of my 1.5 year-old laptop. We had purchased a two-year extended warranty. The Staples phone tech said it would take 7-10 business days to fix and shipped me a box.</p>
<p>I made a copy of all of my documents and photos but did not copy the entire hard drive and did not erase the hard drive.</p>
<p>A few weeks later I received a phone call telling me they were unable to repair it at a reasonable cost to them so they had sent it to a salvage yard and would be issuing a gift card in the amount of the original laptop price (but not tax [9.75 here] or the cost of the warranty). </p>
<p>I was not given the option of having it returned to me. In fact, it had been sent to the salvage yard over week earlier.</p>
<p>No, they will not allow the remaining six months on the warranty to be used or refunded.</p>
<p>No, they have no way to retrieve it from the salvage yard. I tried speaking to Staples and the non-affiliated warranty company and the non-affiliated salvage yard.</p>
<p>So then I started thinking </p>
<p>Do the guys at the salvage yard hook their iPods up to all of the iTunes libraries on the hard drives?</p>
<p>What if theres a new weirdo employee who is going to take my hundreds of photos (including children) and photoshop them into who-knows-what-type of perversion?</p>
<p>If that original tech had even suggested they might not repair it I would not have sent it in but he was sure a broken period key and a loose power port were no problem. I am so mad.</p>
<p>Added: I’ve had some people tell me I should have erased the hard drive, but others who say “erased” drives are still accessible to those that know how.</p>
<p>I’m sure that there is some person in some third world country that is data mining from people’s discarded hard drives. So thinks a friend who always keeps his hard drives after the computer is thrown away.</p>
<p>I agree that Staples should change their policy so that you can retrieve your hard drive if they are not going to fix your computer. It’s the right thing to do.</p>
<p>Wow that’s an outrage. I’ve never heard of that. we got ours through Best BUy with the Geek Squad warranty. They’ve replaced the hard drive twice and the power cord once with no problems. I guess I should be a lot more appreciative.</p>
<p>I still have the hard drives from my old computers purchased in 1995 and 1999. I’m shocked they didn’t tell you what they were going to do to give you the opportunity to backup and then format the hard drive.</p>
I use the same technique. By the time I get a new computer the old HDD isn’t worth much anyway.</p>
<p>
For the majority of people who’d be receiving the old HDD and seeing if there’s anything on it, a simple full format is sufficient. To guard against someone with forensic abilities, special programs need to be used. A hammer is easier, more convenient, and cheaper.</p>
<p>
It’s too late now, but if one cares about what’s on the HDD from a security perspective (personal stuff on the disk) they should ‘never’ send it somewhere out of their control. An alternative is to encrypt the personal data on the HDD. This is easy to do with Windows although I’ve heard the Windows one isn’t that difficult to crack. </p>
<p>I think in this case the action Staples took was wrong. At a minimum they should have offered the choice of getting it back. They had no way to know whether you backed up your files first or had personal data on the HDD.</p>
<p>I doubt the salvage people will do anything untoward with the laptop. Assuming they get a large number of them, they’ll likely start out by reformating the drive and loading an OS on it fresh or just cannibalizing it and making the parts available - hopefully with a clean HDD.</p>
<p>But did you get the old hard drive back so you could hammer it (while humming, If I Had a Hammer–I’d take it to my hard drive–then I’d take it to the Staples Store–all over this land…).</p>
This is true if all that one did was simply use the “delete” or “erase” functions. When one does this all that really happens is that the pointer to the file marks it as deleted but the data is still on the disk until eventually the system writes other data over the area. A ‘low level format’ wipes out all the data by writing a particular pattern to the drive. This will stop most people from being able to retrieve the contents but some people may still be able to retrieve the data with special forensic tools since there’s still some residual magnetic levels reflecting the former bits. Finally, there are applications available that write various bit patterns repeatedly to the same areas that wipe out that residual magnetic effect. The disk at this point would generally be considered unreadable.</p>
<p>Not letting the HDD out of your control or a hammer also solves the problem.</p>
<p>“But did you get the old hard drive back so you could hammer it (while humming, If I Had a Hammer–I’d take it to my hard drive–then I’d take it to the Staples Store–all over this land…).”</p>
<p>If I’d only thought of that! We should all get together and do that as a final farewell to our computers.</p>
<p>I actually don’t keep much on my computer. I don’t even have a digital camera to put pictures on there, so all there is are a few essays.</p>
<p>I’m sorry to hear about this. What’s wrong with people? If I had sent my computer in to be repaired I would have trusted that they would do what they said they would do, so I wouldn’t have erased my hard drive, either. </p>
<p>Have you spoken with anyone “in power” who can offer any explanation or apology about this?</p>
<p>If you have to send in a computer for repair, backup the disk to an internal or external drive, reinstall the original operating system and then send it in. And do that low-level format.</p>
<p>You could have teenagers or college hackers working for the company that does the repairs and they aren’t always the most professional of workers.</p>
<p>At work, we have a very powerful permanent magnet somewhere (I think that it’s in the IT department) and that’s used for wiping out hard drives when a system or drive is disposed of.</p>
<p>For those traveling internationally, there’s a new concern about seizing laptops and music players at the border. This is incoming into the US and incoming into Canada. It’s a problem for businesses because they may have proprietary information on their laptops. There’s a move to putting more company information on internal servers which are just accessed by the laptop with no confidential information on the laptop. If the laptop is seized by a border agent on a power trip, then only the laptop is lost which isn’t the valuable part. The problem is if a laptop is seized and there is personal information that goes along with it.</p>
<p>A good way to keep up with these kinds of issues is to read slashdot.</p>
<p>That sounds outrageous Mary. Why would there not be a phonecall from their customer service letting you know that they could not fix it. They had absolutely no right to dispose of your computer without checking first whether there was anything you needed retrieved from it.</p>
<p>There is a story of an IT worker at MIT that contacted Steve Jobs via email about his problems with his MacBook. Apple informed the consumer that they would replace his MacBook but that he wouldn’t get the old machine back. He emailed Steve Jobs and his assistant got him a new MacBook very quickly and they sent him back the old laptop so that he could retrieve his data. That story had a happy ending but I’d still save my data and not trust anyone else with it.</p>