Sunday, February 17, 2013

A Hard Drive That Was D.O.A.

I was going to post on Friday Night but I got waylaid by a bad external hard drive, which was literally brand new out of the box! I bought a bunch of external hard drives the day before Thanksgiving last year as Target stores had a huge sale on them and you couldn't beat the prices! So I bought several and stored them away. I had to make a copy of a previous drive this weekend and so I went to the closet and pulled out a new box with a drive and plugged it in.

Nothing happened. It just sat there. I tapped it lightly. Nothing. Unplugged it and then plugged it in again. Nothing. Dead on arrival! I couldn't believe it. Never had that happen before where it didn't make a sound. Possibly someone dropped it at the store and it still got on the shelf. I then took it and tried it on one of my other computers. Still nothing.

I then ran to the closet and pulled out the other three new hard drives that were sitting there, took the shrinkwrap off and plugged them right in to see if they worked. If they were bad too I was in a bad spot. Luckily they all fired up and were fine so I just had the one bad drive to replace. I had the receipt for all the drives in my taxes folder and so I took it back to Target last night and got a new drive! I waited till evening when I though the return line at Target would have little to no people and to my surprise there was no line! Since I just needed to exchange it there was no problem as it was still close to their store policy as to how long they would honor a return. I got the drive exchanged and went home again and plugged the new one and it fired right up.

I write this now just to let anyone out there who buys a external hard drive and has no use for it at the moment and decides to store it away that you'd better open up the box and test it out just to be sure it works! You don't want to wait too long and find out it's bad and you can't return it! Thought I'd share!

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