Backup before repair

[latamesh]

Graduate student found out the hard way about HP's laptop policy. All she wanted to do was to replace the "p" key and they made her ship the laptop instead.

Hewlett Packard Wipes Your Hard Drive To Fix A Broken Key On Your Keyboard

Lots of useful info on restoring the HDD.

Is it standard procedure for all mobile PC manufacturers or just HP?

[glc]

And now here's the official obligatory moral of the story: Please remember to back up your data before sending your computer in for any kind of repair.

Nothing else needs to be said.

[juppy]

There's one person in the comments below the story that says he used to work for HP Support and that it's NOT their policy, but data loss *may* occur. Personally, it sounds like somebody there saw that she had a whole bunch of possibly important stuff on the drive and just decided to erase it to be annoying.

Another one of the comments had a good protection plan:

I send laptops to them all the time for warranty work. My secret: remove the hard drive, then send it in. Hard to wipe what is not there.

[Planefreak]

That just goes without saying but then again here we are, letting the world know you should back up your files.

You should always back up files. What would you do if someone walked off with your computer? It happens...

JUST BACK UP YOUR STUFF AND EXPECT THEM TO TAMPER WITH YOUR FILES!!!

[glc]

Here is another possible scenario - they booted it up and found illegal stuff and/or porn, and wiped it to legally cover their behinds.

[latamesh]

Originally Posted by glc Here is another possible scenario - they booted it up and found illegal stuff and/or porn, and wiped it to legally cover their behinds.

Unless they d/l first for themselves, like Geek Squad at Best Buys were busted for doing so ;-).