If you take an HD in for replacement, bring a drill.

[Paddy]

I bought a bundle of computers from ebay all of which had very sensitive data on them. I did think about attempting to contact the owners even if just to check that they wern't stolen, but given the nature of the data i felt that perhaps they wouldn't to be contacted ...

[MultimediaMan]

Diskpart -> Clean All

[KvHagedorn]

That's what he gets for shopping at Best Buy and trusting a megacorp. What a ****ing moron.

[Elie]

never return a drive to Best buy or outlets like that, always send it back to the manufacturer for a replacement.

Cheers,
Elie

[Jessterw]

That's what he gets for shopping at Best Buy and trusting a megacorp. What a ****ing moron.

You sir are the moron. It's just as likely that you could get screwed over by a small business, who are not saints by default. Nevermind that as a consumer he did what he expected to be the proper thing to do. Not knowing better does not deserve him such a comment.

[KvHagedorn]

You have data on that drive. To trust anyone else with it is an extremely ignorant thing to do. If he had gone to a local businessman he could trust, he might have had direct recourse when he got screwed like this, and if he trusted the guy, he probably wouldn't have gotten screwed in the first place. When you have an amalgam of minimum-wage youngsters governed by conscienceless policy, you can count on being screwed. That's a megacorp for you. You have no ground to call me a moron, Jesse.. unless you have some emotional attachment to the ideals of depersonalization that modern society in its worship of the megacorp ascribes to.

[Jessterw]

Oh that's laughable. First off, this individual knew that the drive contained personal information and knew that there was a risk, proven by the fact that the asked for the drive back several times. To say that he is a moron because he was utilizing a free replacement mechanism provided by a warranty from the place of purchase is baseless. He didn't trust anyone with his data, he was simply given no other choice in the matter.

Secondly, me calling you a moron based on your asinine comment has absolutely nothing to do with the nonsense you spewed in that closing remark. Though maybe you're right, moron was the wrong word to use...

[Wombat]

Don't worry, he's just upset that Best Buy would hire "multicultural" males as techs, and not staff themselves completely with 15-year-old white virgin girls.

[MultimediaMan]

KvH; between you and Gurm, I'd be hard pressed to choose which of you are more abrasive - at least in your online postings.

Most people nowadays look at computers as another home appliance and have little or no idea how they work. Yes, we can sit here and sneer about how incompetent they are from a systems administration point of view, but does it accomplish anything?

We all know:

1) Recovering data from a formatted hard disk is not all that hard.
2) An end to end wipe of a large hard disk can take hours to complete.
3) People in general are ignorant about the inner workings of the PCs.

I don't know of any hard disk manufacturer/ reseller which guarantees to destroy data left on a hard disk for repair, replacement or disposal.

I do know of many organizations (my employer being one of them) which are specifically not permitted to exchange hard disks because of that very reason, however.

[KvHagedorn]

Look.. would you rather lose all your personal information or be a big man and say screw the warranty? It's an eighty buck hard drive! Blow it up! It's a matter of weighing the potential damage versus added expense.

When you live in a society where everyone moves every year, no one knows anyone else anymore, and it's because megacorps flick us around like kites on a string, saying move or be fired, no one knows who to trust in this environment. I'm blasting the whole society.

I have had one drive I sent back directly to the manufacturer for warranty purposes, and only did it because I was able to low-level format it.

[The PIT]

Not Surprising. I shudder to think how many unwiped hard drives go out to these scrap companies that end up in dumps and distant countries with important data on.

[MultimediaMan]

You are entitled to believe what you believe... however, every chance you get, you rant about how terrible everything is because of everything else - except - wait for it...

You.

KvH can do no wrong, and has all of the answers; He's quick to blame the ignorant (the user in the case), and even quicker to vilify the innocent (Best Buy, because they didn't do something to KvH's satisfaction.); and blame the uninvolved (the so-called Megacorps).

[KvHagedorn]

Best Buy IS a megacorp. And so is the drive company (Maxtor).

[Dilitante1]

and Wal-mart (millions of evil minions)

[Wombat]

Best Buy IS a megacorp. And so is the drive company (Maxtor).

Go ahead and tell me how you get your hard drives from the little old man down the street that crafts his by hand

These people had a contractual expectation that Best Buy would destroy the data. If you read the article and comments on Slashdot about this, you'll see that it's BB policy to drill the hard drive while the customer watches. This is a story about a store whose employees (most likely) decided to make a little extra money by selling things they should have obliterated.