Emachines hard drive replacement - Acer won't return original hard drive

Mugatuu

Hi, just looking for some help regarding my laptop.
I bought an Acer Emachines laptop last October and last week the hard drive failed on the laptop, brought the laptop back to D.I.D in Kilkenny as it's still under warranty and they sent it off for repair and said the hard drive would be replaced but that anything on the hard drive would be lost. I asked for the original hard drive back and they told me that they would be keeping the original hard drive as they are replacing my hard drive and I mentioned how I had college documents and photos on the drive I needed they said if I really wanted it back I would have to pay between €200-€300 ?! I cant understand why they want that sort of money for a broken drive..? I told them my brother in law would be able to retrieve what was on the drive I wasn't asking them to try retrieve it just wanted the laptop fixed.
Any help please as to what to do about the old hard drive or how to get it back without giving them money?!
Mugatuu.

Alanstrainor

Take the laptop back, get your brother in law to get the files off it (if that's possible) and then bring it back to them for warranty repair.

There should be no need to open the laptop at all if you're afraid of affecting the warranty. There's plenty of options out there to allow you to boot into different operating systems by using usb sticks or burning a bootable cd(Ubuntu is what I used to use, but there's plenty.)

The data isn't covered under warranty, only the hardware itself. Taking back the bad drive would be standard practice - if they do the repair in-house then they'd need to return the drive to Acer to be credited for it. The price they quoted does sound steep though, maybe it was for a data recovery service?

If you need to make an attempt to recover the data, your best bet is what Alanstrainor said, try to get the laptop back as is and use whatever software you can on it. Then return it again.

Mugatuu

They have the laptop already sent off, i was only told this today when I called to see if it was back, they never mentioned not being able to get the original drive back or anything when I brought it in for repair, the laptop was brought in last Friday and sent off Monday this week and there was only a weeks warranty left on it when I brought it in, will this affect the warranty if I ask for it back try get the files retrieved and then bring it back to them?! Sorry I'm not great with laptops!

Mugatuu

The price quoted was just for returning the drive not for any data recovery I questioned them on it, what actually happened the laptop itself was a notice came up on screen about the hard drive failed and it attempted to back up all the data and then the laptop turned off about a minute into the back-up process, turning it back on it goes so far and the screen goes black and there's a cursor flashing in the top left hand corner ?

Alanstrainor

I'm afraid that if the laptop has been sent away, your chances of getting your data back are slim.

Even if you had the disk that is broken, it is not guaranteed that you would be able to recover from it at all. If the drive is not detectable by the computer at all it would be curtains for anything on it. Not unless you were willing to spend hundreds/thousands sending it off to specialist companies to recover data from broken drives.

Just an fyi, for the future. Use a service like http://www.dropbox.com for your importand documents and files. It's free for the first 2.5GB, and it will keep all your documents safe in case anything like this happens in the future.