Troubleshooting or getting replaced your Hard Drive - Step by Step

[Santy]

Is your hard drive failed and your various workaround direct you to a techincal problem? If your hard drive is still under warranty, you can use the procedures of product returns (RMA) of most manufacturers to resubmit your hard drive and receive a new one instead.

If you are unable to access your hard drive, this can have various origins. This may be due to a logical problem in partitions or boot sector of the disk and if so, a free program like TestDisk can help you repair and recover files that are on them. In the case of a mechanical problem where the hard drive makes a strange noise, do not start or if cyclic redundancy errors or bad clusters, your disk drive is no longer usable.

You can then use the guarantee of your hard drive for its replacement by a functional product. Most hard drive manufacturers offer in effect procedures for product returns (RMA) to return your failed hard drive and receive a new one instead. Note that these programs fail to recover data on your hard drive fails. To do this, you must turn to specialized companies fairly expensive.

You must therefore make a line on what was on your hard drive, but this is not a concern since, as we remind you often, you've made backups .

RMA pages for different manufacturers:

Below are the pages of various manufacturers containing the forms to complete to check the warranty on your hard drive and request a return.

1. Seagate
2. Western Digital
3. Hitachi
4. LaCie
5. Samsung

[Santy]

Procedure of returning the Drive:

Just for an example, lets assume Iomega portable external hard drive has failed. We'll check the warranty and start the return process. Note that links and categories here are specific to Iomega, but the steps remain essentially the same for other manufacturers.

• Go to page RMA the manufacturer of your hard drive.
  
  
• Note the serial number of your hard drive.
  
  
• Enter it in the form. Check yes, I am 13 years or more and click Next.
  
  
• If you already have an account Iomega, please login, if not, create a new account.
  
  
• Then complete the form and click Submit.
  
  
• Your hard disk appears in the My products. Click Support & downloads.
  
  
• Click on the Email Help section online.
  
  
• Reenter the serial number of your hard disk and click OK.
  
  
• Your product is under warranty, click E-mail to the How to get help.
  
  
• Then describe the problem you encountered with your hard drive.
  
  
• Then click the Send button issue.
  
  
• Click Finish to submit the question.
  
  
• You then have to await a response from the helpdesk. In our case, Iomega is committed to respond within the next business day.
  
  
• The next day we do get a message telling us that demand Iomega replacement had been recorded.
  
  
• A few minutes later, we received an email regarding the application for return. Click on the link provided to retrieve information packaging and label the back of the drive.
  
  
• Iomega then gives you the information to properly package your product. Here, the disk drive must be returned without his or her cable original box. While some manufacturers do not support the cost of returning goods is not the case of Iomega, which shall bear the shipping costs. So we have to pay anything.
  
  
• Click Print Label to print the return label that contains the required information from your hard drive RMA and prepaid shipping label.

[Santy]

Packing and shipping the hard drive:

To send your hard drive, you'll have good protection.

• To pack your hard disk, the ideal is to recover the original packaging if you have not discarded. Otherwise, put it in a plastic bag and wrap it in bubble wrap or foam.
  
  
• Wrap the box with kraft paper.
  
  
• Paste over the return label colissimo you printed.
  
  
• It'll just go to the post office to drop off your package (free) and stamp the proof of filing with the printed label.

Recover hard drive:

After dismissing your hard drive, you'll have to wait until the manufacturer receives and processes the replacement. This may last a week as a month. Take your evil woman. For our replacement with Iomega, it was very fast.

• Five days after sending the hard drive, we receive an email indicating that a complete product replacement we were shipped.
  
  
• Five days later (total of 10 days after sending the failed hard drive), we get Chronopost the hard disk.
  
  
• As evidenced by the serial number, the hard disk is different from what we sent. A sticker indicates that the drive is not necessarily "new" and that this may be a refurbished product (subject to the same tests and guarantees that new products).
  
  
• We connect the hard drive on our computer: it is detected and works perfectly. Successful replacement.