Monday, March 2, 2009

A Tale of 2 vendors

As some know I had sent my laptop back to HP for them to fix the screen hinge damage. An estimated 10-12 business days or in normal language 2-3 weeks was expected.
Imagine my surprise when the email came 48 hours later that it would be on its way back.
Very excited to hear this news I brought it to the office this morning and unboxed it to find a note that says the ominous words "Drive reimaged".

Uh oh! Yep, HP wiped the drive. Now to be fair, I believe they gave me a new drive as well as a monitor because the problems may have been heat from the processor or drive or both which burnt or melted the hinge. Well that is my story and I am preferring it over the fact that for no reason at all they restored my drive to day one.

My laptop I notice now is slower than before but only because I compare it to my Ideapad, which I love, aside from its wi-fi finickiness.

Now the problem is in restoring my data to the laptop will take hours, about 7+. And I won't know if anything works properly or not until it reboots.

Thanks HP, but next time when I ask if I should include the drive, just say no and also don't promise my data will be fine if you know it won't be.

So moving on to Seagate. My love, we've been through many drives together, some good some bad but when you have a monopoly you will be the one everyone comes to. So it's a good thing they stand by their warranty and sent me a new drive so easily. Online site to handle it all, includes directions for packaging and within a week got a new one, in fact it just came.

Can't wait to use it, it will be part of a new server I am building, a Red Hat version for our portable server line as a few people have asked about it.

No data was on the previous drive and if it was, well no big deal it was on our mule. So off I go to format a new drive and play with Red Hat.


  1. I'm very surprised they told you your data would be fine. All vendors I've ever sent laptops back to (that would include Gateway, Dell, IBM, and HP) have told me that they reserve the right to wipe the drive in order to guarantee service, and have advised me to back up data before sending it in. When I've asked if I should remove the drive, I've sometimes been told that they can't guarantee the repair unless they receive the machine with the drive -- but in some cases I've done it anyhow.

    BTW: it is also advisable to remove any 3rd party RAM before sending in any laptop, as it gives the vendor a potential reason to claim that damage was potentially caused by unapproved upgrades.

  2. Thanks Richard, hadn't thought of my RAM. hmm.
    They of course told me to back it up which I did, but my point was i did not want to go through the headache.
    but they insisted they needed it.
    Still restoring, only 58 more hours to go. Wait it said days a second to love microsoft time.

  3. What are you using for backup/restore? Seems awfully slow.

  4. I just realized I had a screen shot of it saying 58 days damn internet ate it, have to find it.

    So as it turns out, ONE file had gone beyond whatever the folder/file/character limit is and hosed it all.
    Once I figured out which file, the copy itself took like 10 minutes or something.
    Go Figure.