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

[cjolley]

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/06/one_year_ago_ha.html

One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.

"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."

...

[TransformX]

Scary sh1t...

[Dr Mordrid]

This post should be echoed on the HW forum.

[High_Jumbllama]

My response to this is, "No shit!", but most people have no clue.

[Brian Ellis]

Have always given scrap HDDs one good blow with a sledge hammer.

[Technoid]

Resold drives are wiped with one of those programs on the UBCD, filled with random data (truecrypt) and wiped again.
Drives that are to broken to wipe and are to be thrown away are dismantled and we use sandpaper on the platters.

[Brian Ellis]

Resold drives are wiped with one of those programs on the UBCD, filled with random data (truecrypt) and wiped again, drives that are to be thrown away are dismantled and we use sandpaper on the platters.

Sledge hammer is quicker and equally effective

[Technoid]

Sledge hammer is quicker and equally effective

Unfortunatley we do have safety regulations

[Marshmallowman]

Having taken the computer for repair they tell they need to replace the Hardrive, then the harddrive turns up a 6 months later in a working state?..that is a definte WTF

Do they refurbish drives and leave the data in place?, or was the shop scamming him to begin with.

[TransformX]

Apparently the person who bought the HDD had to do some things in order to make it work again. This means that they didn't dispose of the defective one in a appropriate way.
Other companies refurbish drives though.

[MultimediaMan]

More than 80% of the "Bad" hard disks we get back from the field are good. There is just corrupt data on them which causes issues. Most people do not know how to check to see if a hard disk is good or bad, or what to make of an error, so they immediately say "hard disk". Sure enough, a newly-imaged hard disk "fixes" the issue, but the old one has nothing wrong with it physically.

I have a fix for that little problem ready to roll as soon as I can get the disk space approved.

[Sasq]

...
I have a fix for that little problem ready to roll as soon as I can get the disk space approved...

Disk space approved, or baseball bat to the back of the head approved for the field techs?

[MultimediaMan]

I'd gladly take both....soon though those knuckle-draggers will only be onsite for what I determine is a hard disk failure, and I will have a chkdsk log to prove it.

[Dilitante1]

do tell sir

[MultimediaMan]

PXE Boot, Windows PE, VNC, Ghost.