A couple of weeks ago I had bootup problems with my old Sony laptop. I had replaced the hard disk in it last year (February), and everything was pointing to another busted hard disk. First time I’d had a machine outlive two hard disks! 😦
Sure enough, I put a different disk in the laptop and it worked, and the original disk in a USB caddy failed (but only after working successfully a couple of times, leading me to think it was a transient problem and reassemble the laptop, at which point it failed again… sigh).
Through persistence and determination (and a couple of goes in the freezer) I managed to get a copy of the disk onto another drive. I then went shopping, but decided to check the warranty on the dud drive: lo-and-behold, it still had nearly four years of a five year warranty to run. Better yet, unlike the Western Digital I had to send at my own cost to Singapore for replacement, Seagate have an address in Australia that can be used.
Sod it, I said, anything more than the original 80GB (since for less than what I paid for the 80GB a year ago I’m looking at 160GB or more!) is wasted on this particular machine, so I completed the RMA, found a box to pack the drive in, and sent it off.
The address in Australia is a mail forwarder to Seagate in Singapore. I had to keep that in mind when I checked their order status page, which a week later was still showing “awaiting your return”. Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before the page changed to “shipped”. Looking a bit closer I could see that my 80GB drive must have put on a bit of weight on the way to its birthplace, as Seagate was sending me a 100GB drive in return!
Having left Singapore last Thursday the drive arrived on Monday, but due to work commitments (plus having to fix the Slug first) I wasn’t able to do anything with it until today. Stay tuned for the recovery exercise…
Crossed Wires 