Never, EVER, trust Dell - Longbow Digital Arts Discussion

Author	Topic: Never, EVER, trust Dell
kv Member	posted September 09, 2002 03:25 PM i'm posting this message in any forum where I can reach my ICQ contacts. If i'm on your contact list, please send me a message so I can re-add you. #30146852. Why i'm posting this: saturday, my hard drive on my laptop began making a noise that I can only describe as "the read head being slammed into the case", and it would do this until XP locked. Upon restart, the drive was fine again for a few hours. Figuring that the drive was failing, I called dell to request a new drive. They wanted to do some "tech support" first to make sure I was right. My tech rep, here on known as moron, wanted to know why I thought I needed a new drive, and when I described the noise to him, he wanted me to try and make the noise myself. Can you make the noise of metal hitting metal and a HD grind noise after each hit? Didn't think so. So then he tells me that his "knowledge base article" says that the noise is caused by the fact that my HD is too fragmented and that I need to defrag in "safe mode." That was the last time I saw a working system. "Safe mode" crashed and took the boot sector with it. "unmountable_boot_volume" blue screen error. Tried fixing that using the microsoft support site. Now my drive is 9 meg according to any command prompt that I can get, but still 30 Gb according to the xp installer. Partition and file tables are destroyed. I've tried using a drive recovery program to recover the files, but that didn't get me very much back. And I think I just destroyed any ICQ databases I had on either machine (talking from desktop now). I expect to be back in a week, but in what capacity is yet to be determined. IP:
SuperUnknown Administrator	posted September 09, 2002 10:32 PM Another classic example of tech support who know nothing.If its not in the big book in front of them they are clueless. IP:
=DNX= Matrix Member	posted September 10, 2002 02:07 PM I recently had a drive going "click, click, click, grind, click" which was not detected and to all intents and purposes a dead drive. I replaced the underside logic board with a new one, drives as good as new now. Also with dicky drives or clickdrives setting SMARTDRIVE from the bios to ON is a good idea; as is backing up any data.. Dell dont know dick-splat... i get callouts from 4 major manufactuer pc owners who got screwed over by their 50p a minute tech support: Compaq Dell Hewlett Packard Packard Bell sorry to hear it fragged your partition tables, liloboot install for linux once did that to me - mulched my entire boot drive from 32 bit to 16 scambling everything in the process.. it also took 2 weeks get everything back as i wanted it and no data was salvageable... the lesson ? If it sounds faulty, it usually is... backup backup backup... Best of luck on the rebuild man. ------------------ -=≡[▓▒░ √‬‬‬‬‬‬‬וּ ίŢ ĐяX ώοſĽП ЇЇЇЇ Ć׀ﺁﭺκ ĦēŘ─ ▓▒░]≡=- ☺≥ - їлģ ╘2002 /\/\∩ŢŔİX IP:
Random Chaos Member	posted September 10, 2002 05:02 PM We had a drive at work fail that way. It was in a desktop however. Started making a click-click-click sound and the system crashed. Unfortunately this was at a remote site (warehouse) so there was no data backup for this person. We checked the drive - couldn't read it. Sent it to a data recovery place (thats $600s for evaluation, $800-$3000 to recover if possible) - after they finished the evaluation they said: "The data is ground to dust. There is nothing left to recover." End result: Loss of 1 person's 3 months worth of work. Ugg. Note: We did not try doing what Dell suggested. That was just stupid. The first thing you need to do with that type of problem is send the drive in for repair and recovery. Don't try to get it going yourself becuase the more you hear that sound, the more drive sectors are being destroyed. Unfortunately repair and recovery is usually more expensive then a new hard drive IP:
=DNX= Matrix Member	posted September 10, 2002 08:01 PM Thats why i repaired mine myself.... id i haddnt, no more online me - id have lost everything. Let me guess the drive type RC - Fujitsu right ? IP:
Random Chaos Member	posted September 10, 2002 08:37 PM I don;t know actually...it was in a Gateway desktop system that was about 2 years old. As for drives though, it seemed that every month or so we were having one of the laptop harddrives fail in the Toshibas we had at work. Lost substantial data on one. The other 2 were backed up. IP:
kv Member	posted September 10, 2002 09:38 PM I'M BACK! at least I have my new drive and xp reinstalled and updated. IP:
666 Member	posted September 26, 2002 01:32 PM Hey...Matrix...what HD do you recommend...I prefer Western Digital... Hey, you are correct...it was a Fujitsu drive that crashed on me too...took everything...it happenned a couple of months ago right in the middle of a DDM... [This message has been edited by 666 (edited September 26, 2002).] IP: