HP wants my hard drive

[silentsnow]

Under the warranty, my recently bought HP pavilion has died. Hard drive failure. They say it's toast and nothing can be extracted from it. We don't want to send it back to HP, in the off chance they can extract our personal data. What can I do? They say if I take a hammer to it, they'll charge me $600 for the replacement drive they sent. I can't seem to track down anyone to talk to me about their warranty.

[renegade600]

you do not have to buy an hp drive, you can order one yourself if you are willing to pay for it and pay less than half.

Most likely you have nothing to worry about if you send the drive back to hp.

what is wrong with the drive? maybe there is something you can do.

[Kirk1]

Any really sensitive data on a hard drive should be protected with strong encryption. If it was not, I guess that advice comes too late. Once a new drive is installed, one thing I would want to do (whether or not I was going to return the old drive to HP) is install the old drive as a slave and see if it can be read and the files retrieved and removed from that drive. (Or install the old drive in another computer that is working.) I have done this successfully a couple of times. In one case, the computer that I was putting the slave drive in did not have a data cable that would handle two drives so I had to buy one. Did not cost much. You probably can find detailed information on installing the drive from the drive manufacturers web site.