What happens when we return a hard drive?

Question

We have a computer here at the office with a failed hard drive. It's still under warranty, so Dell is going to replace it, but they want the dead hard drive to be sent back. My boss is concerned about sending back the hard drive, because it does have some company information on it. Since the drive failed, we cannot even start it up to run any memory cleaner programs. What will happen with the hard drive that we send back?

DELL-Jesse L · Answer

atticusm,

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

They send it back to the manufacturer in most cases. Once they have it they will try to fix it and of course wipe out all information.

Message Edited by DELL-Jesse on 10-17-2007 12:36 PM

Hawkster66 · Answer

This trick has worked in the past. It may or may not work on your drive. We've been able to get drives to spin up and recover some/most of the data off them. Put the drive in two freezer bags, make sure it's sealed well so no moisture can get in. Keep it in the freezer overnight and the next morning have a machine open, off, and ready to receive the drive. Go directly from the freezer to the PC and you might get some time with the drive.

RoHe · Answer

Install the failed HD as secondary after the new one is up and running. If it spins up you can reformat it and/or use some of the freeware available on the net to overwrite it before shipping back to Dell.

If you don't have a lot of files to delete, Spybot Search&Destroy (free) has a built-in secure shredder that overwrites files 5+ times to prevent recovery. It can be a pain to use because you have to drag every file into Spybot's shredder, rather than doing a global reformat or global overwrite of the whole drive.

Ron

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What happens when we return a hard drive?

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