What do you mean my HDD is blank!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[DeltaSierra]

What I fail to understand (and for the record I always have my backups made) is why I have heard reports of people sending their laptops in for something as simple as having a loose USB port fixed, or a broken key replaced, and their laptop is returned sans OS. Why/how does that require wiping the HD?

[bean]

If they still have a Windows 7 key - and if they bought it with the OS preloaded, it should be on a sticker - they can use any Windows 7 installation media.

They can also (legally) download said installation media directly from Microsoft.

[Amadan]

What I fail to understand (and for the record I always have my backups made) is why I have heard reports of people sending their laptops in for something as simple as having a loose USB port fixed, or a broken key replaced, and their laptop is returned sans OS. Why/how does that require wiping the HD?

Some companies do it for security reasons, for example to stop techs nosing around peoples' hdds.

Personally when I was a tech I wasn't very interested in a customers data, other than backing it up because I've seen enough not to actually look deliberately, unless they were hot of course.

As for the original, if the customer was sucky I'd charge them £50 to reinstall windows either using a recovery DVD (which I may have had as we kept ISOs of new machines recovery disks for about 6 months to speed up setting up new machines - each new machine coming with a copy of the recovery media) or a Windows DVD and driver install. If they were nice I would quite often take pity on them and do it for free as a low priority job.

[PepperElf]

As an aside: Just because a disk is coming up unbootable/unreadable, it doesn't mean the data is lost, just the index that tells the computer where on the drive the data is stored. There are some cheap and even some free utilities out there that will allow you to scrounge for data stored on a crapped out hard drive.

^-.-^

in her case the HDD was replaced so there was no data on it and the service center usually doesn't return the bad drives. (and as for data backups it's not our fault if the customer declines)

and yeah, i know about recovery discs... the problem is that many people who don't know anything about computers don't understand it.