I purchased a new HP TouchSmart computer back in August. Yesterday, my hard drive failed. I called tech support, and they confirmed what I already knew. They offered to send me a replacement hard drive. I asked about free data recovery, and they said they didn’t offer that. If this was a random failure, I could absolutely understand. But I have since found out it is not.

Read moreAfter I setup a replacement to be sent, I went online using my husband’s laptop last night, and I looked up hard drive failures for the TouchSmart. To no surprise, I found I wasn’t the only one. Through some more reading, I found this article, and this article, which states these hard drives are “failing at an alarming rate”. It also states that Seagate, the manufacturer of my hard drive, is offering owners of their flagship hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11 free data recovery.

Was I ever happy! That’s the model I have! Both articles say:

“…if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services,” the company said. ‘Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business.'”

So this morning I called Seagate, and to my surprise, I got the run around. Seagate said that I bought my hard drive through HP, so they won’t deal with me. They say that I need to deal with HP, and when I call HP, they tell me they aren’t required to honor this because it is not written in “their guidelines”.

Good old big business squishing the little guy. I am so tired of it.

I called HP corporate, got put back into their technical support queue, and got the run around a second time. Finally, I called customer service back again, and I demanded a manager, and I was given to the “Executive Customer Relations” department, but it was fruitless as well. They refuse to help me because well, they chose not to. End of story.

My hands are tied.

Yet when I look at everything quoted in the article online by ComputerWorld.com or the MaximumPC.com, Seagate doesn’t say that they will only help people with affected hard drives that were purchased directly through them, does it? No, it doesn’t!

When I type in my product serial number at Seagate, it clearly says “DRIVE IS AFFECTED”

I feel violated.

To people who are experiencing this failure, like I am now, do know there is a law firm out there that is considering a class action lawsuit. You might want to put your name on the list. But I just spoke with them, too, and well, if you bought your hard drive through HP (built into your new computer), well, they aren’t interested to represent you. The waters get murky in this case. Too murky. If you are affected, like me, feel free to post an e-mail below and let me know if you want to be contacted if I get any help.

I have also contacted the local media investigative team to get the word out there. If a manufacturer of a product is offering a free service to fix a defective product, they should stand by it. I should not be denied because I bought their product through another company. Most people don’t buy hard drives by themselves. They buy them inside already manufactured computers.

This has been a very negative experience for me with both Seagate and HP.
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Other People Talking about experiencing the same thing with HP and Seagate.

Update: 02-09-2009:
HP sent me another Seagate drive — same model with the same defective firmware on it, though Seagate does say that this unit by the serial number is “not affected”. I wonder if I will crash again like it did for the other guy in the forum above?

Update: 2-26-2009:
http://eyesforlies.blogspot.com/2009/02/my-hard-drive-is-back.html

It took HP 14 days to send me recovery disks. This is absolutely unacceptable.

The people who I had repair my hard drive, One Data World Recovery, told me that I run a 40% chance that this hard drive will fail, too.

Update 6-11-2009:
My second hard drive replacement failed this week, and what did HP do? They send me another defective drive by Seagate. This is unacceptable.