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Ask Slashdot: How To Deal With Refurbed Drives With Customer Data?
An anonymous reader writes "I just received 3 'refurbished' SATA drives from Newegg. All 3 had some sort of existing partition. Most appeared to be factory diagnostic partitions, but one had a full Dell Windows XP install complete with customer data. How big a deal is this? Should I contact someone besides Newegg about this?"
First check for free porn, then call New Egg about it.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Same thing you do with every other mostly-dead drive: Go through it and look for pr0n.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Just looking at it won't hurt anyone.
Unless, of course, there is an unencrypted version of the Dark Book of The Elder Gods on the drive....
Check your premises.
I once had to wipe some disks before throwing them out (nothing really sensitive or important). But they were SCSI and I didn't have a SCSI enabled PC handy and I couldn't be bothered setting something up or downing a server to do it, etc.
So I came up with a technique for making the disks safe for disposal.
First, I threw them out the 2nd story window a few times. Then I hurled them at the ground a few more times as hard as I could for good measure.
Then I put them in a plastic bag with a heap of dog shit and water, tied the bag up and put them in the bin. If anyone still wanted to try to retrieve that data, they've earned it.
True Story. Still makes me smile.
I once went over an "unwiped" drive looking for pron. What I found was a folder of "racy" photos the previous owner took. Unfortunately she was twenty years older than me, had about 200 lbs on me, and had a penchant for butternut squash, a food I can not eat to this day.
Knowledge is power, ignorance is bliss, and no amount of eye bleach will remove some images.
Looking at the data legally puts you at risk. The other company may care. If the data was government/military, there's a headache you don't want. Erase it immediately so there is no question. While no one can prove you looked at it or not, no need to make it worse on you.
If you purchased the drive, then you purchased the contents. They now belong to you. Please look through it, find anything interesting, and post it here.
Yes, that's the point of rare earth magnets. That they are more powerful than normal magnets. I'm glad you understand!
c++;
That significantly reduces the changes of successfully making a warranty claim, and that is probably the issue.
No. It must be lured into a factory where there are huge vats of molten metals, frozen by a truck full of liquid nitrogen, shot into smithereens, and then eventually dropped into the molten metal. I know, it sounds like a lot of work but trust me, its cool to watch. Well worth the effort.