Had to send my Hitachi 320GB 7K500 PATA HDD for RMA last month. The HDD was in an external USB cum firewire casing. Thw wire from the casing (which was resting in a shelf at the bottom of my computer table) to the front USB port got pulled by my leg when I got up from my seat.
The drive was powered on but there was no transfer going on. Neverthless, the casing jumped up a little and fell on the ground. On trying to use the drive again, a repeated muffled grinding sound was heard. 300GB of information gone in an instant
. Tried freezing it for 8 hrs and reconnected to see if it would work. It didn't.
I took it back to Computer Shop on Brigade Road and handed it in. On inspecting it a bit, the person took it and asked me to call a guy named Naushad after a week.(Seems Sabir and Stanley are not avbl these days.)
Called after a week. Was told that the HDD was sent to Hitachi by courier but it would take another 2-3 days. Called a week after that and was told that my drive was ready
. Went and picked it up after two days. New one is Made in China . Anyways I said.... Was told that the warranty would continue with the new drive. Tested the new drive. It's working fine :clap: .
Some recommendations I learnt from this experience.
1) When you enter the S/N no. at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, enter the country of manufacture.(saw someone complain that India was not avbl in the list of countries. I had to enter Thailand.)
2) A good dealer is important for Hitachi drives as Hitachi deals with the dealer directly and askes on their website to take the HDD back to the point of purchase.
3) Act like a noob when you go for RMA. Act a little indignant and say that you don't understand why it's conked off. Ask a little impatiently as to when the new drive will arrive. Don't overdo it though
.
Funny thing happened thereafter. My external HDD acts as a backup for my identical Hitachi 320 GB internal HDD. So I had a copy of most of my data(I lost some that was not in sync due to space issues. I have more than 300GB of data so I had to backup only what was necessary.)
Unfortunately, I had to use the win xp setup CD to remove some bad sectors from my Raptor RAID array. I wrongly selected my 320GB and fooled around using DISKPART then chkdsk etc. I ended up with a new FAT32 120GB partition on my internal Hitachi HDD:huh: .
Fortunately I read some threads on TE on how to recover data from an NTFS partition. Thanks to medpal's recommendation of using GetDataBackForNTFS, I've managed to recover my data.(It's still work in progress as I've been busy and had to wait for the new HDD to arrive to copy the data back into(can't overwrite the drive on which you want to recover data from).
This experience has led me to believe that a simple internal + external HDD solution is not enough for protecting data. I just might have to buy a few more HDDs
. Also Hitachi is too delicate for me....wonder how Seagate is :bleh: ?
The drive was powered on but there was no transfer going on. Neverthless, the casing jumped up a little and fell on the ground. On trying to use the drive again, a repeated muffled grinding sound was heard. 300GB of information gone in an instant
. Tried freezing it for 8 hrs and reconnected to see if it would work. It didn't.I took it back to Computer Shop on Brigade Road and handed it in. On inspecting it a bit, the person took it and asked me to call a guy named Naushad after a week.(Seems Sabir and Stanley are not avbl these days.)
Called after a week. Was told that the HDD was sent to Hitachi by courier but it would take another 2-3 days. Called a week after that and was told that my drive was ready
. Went and picked it up after two days. New one is Made in China . Anyways I said.... Was told that the warranty would continue with the new drive. Tested the new drive. It's working fine :clap: .Some recommendations I learnt from this experience.
1) When you enter the S/N no. at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, enter the country of manufacture.(saw someone complain that India was not avbl in the list of countries. I had to enter Thailand.)
2) A good dealer is important for Hitachi drives as Hitachi deals with the dealer directly and askes on their website to take the HDD back to the point of purchase.
3) Act like a noob when you go for RMA. Act a little indignant and say that you don't understand why it's conked off. Ask a little impatiently as to when the new drive will arrive. Don't overdo it though
.Funny thing happened thereafter. My external HDD acts as a backup for my identical Hitachi 320 GB internal HDD. So I had a copy of most of my data(I lost some that was not in sync due to space issues. I have more than 300GB of data so I had to backup only what was necessary.)
Unfortunately, I had to use the win xp setup CD to remove some bad sectors from my Raptor RAID array. I wrongly selected my 320GB and fooled around using DISKPART then chkdsk etc. I ended up with a new FAT32 120GB partition on my internal Hitachi HDD:huh: .
Fortunately I read some threads on TE on how to recover data from an NTFS partition. Thanks to medpal's recommendation of using GetDataBackForNTFS, I've managed to recover my data.(It's still work in progress as I've been busy and had to wait for the new HDD to arrive to copy the data back into(can't overwrite the drive on which you want to recover data from).
This experience has led me to believe that a simple internal + external HDD solution is not enough for protecting data. I just might have to buy a few more HDDs
. Also Hitachi is too delicate for me....wonder how Seagate is :bleh: ?
.
hyeah: 