WD Caviar Blue HD Crash- Warranty

[Hunter Makoy]

One of my hard drives has recently gone out. It is my OS drive and carries all my personal information. The drive is just under 2 years old so it is still under warranty with WD. However, looking at the RMA information on WD they want me to send it back.

What should be done in this situation considering I do not want to return a HD (crashed or not) with personal information on it?

[Crazyeyesreaper]

then you bite the bullet buy a new drive and smash that one, theirs other choices some ppl replace the PCB with another identicle one and it lets the drive work to save their data, Ive even seen someone pull the platters out and place them in a different drive before very rare that EVER works as in .01% chance it succeeds but it has been done,

first choice is the simplest choice tho, smash it buy a new one start over.

[Ishan]

I wouldn't worry about your personal information as WD probably gets thousands of RMA requests in a single day so i very much doubt that anyone will be looking for data or family pics etc on your dead HDD.

In addition i believe they even have some sort of policy in which they personally guarantee that won't do such shady things to their customers. We have to dig that info from their website though as i could be probably wrong.

[mrmouth]

They will run down the problem with you through tech support before they give you an RMA number. Ive read on Overclockers that they really only bench test and trouble shoot the high end models where it makes sense financially. They most likely would toss yours in a rack and run a bare bones program to see if it runs, responds, whatever. Having their people run your drive on an OS where they could access your stuff would be a legal nightmare.