I suspect a client broke my HD...

Steve Laramie

Steve Laramie

Veteran
I DPed a short and dumped the files onto a drive. Gave it to her one day and I tested the drive out on her laptop and everything worked fine. 2 days later I get a call saying she can no longer mount my hard drive. I was guaranteed it was in perfect working condition when I gave it to her and now... it apparently isn't. I have some important files on that drive to that will need to be recovered. Can I charge her if it doesn't work on my computer? I dont need a lecture on backing stuff up this has old footage I just remembered was on their.
 
I don't know if you can charge her for anything because external hard drives especially go bad all the time. Maybe if you found a dent from her dropping it or that she plugged in the wrong power adapter for some reason.

In the future, you could have the client provide their own or make sure to use a clean one of yours.

Bad luck though. Technology...

Best Regards,
Andy
 
did you see the drive in its present condition or your just going by what the client told you? if it doesn't mount, it could be an OS or cable problem.
 
Yes it could definitely be an OS or cable problem. All she says is that it wont mount on 3 different computers. Sure this is a 2 year old drive. But I have been using it for 2 years with no problems I find it an interesting coincidence.
 
lairhair said:
Yes it could definitely be an OS or cable problem. All she says is that it wont mount on 3 different computers. Sure this is a 2 year old drive. But I have been using it for 2 years with no problems I find it an interesting coincidence.
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I had an external drive, WD "My Book," that recently just out of the blue wouldn't mount, dead on two different computers. Did some experimenting before I chucked it and found that it was the wall-wart power supply that had failed - still working but the voltage had sagged. Got a new power supply and the drive works like a champ. But catastrophic drive failures are not unheard of - like I tell my students, there are two kinds of users in the world, those who have had a drive fail and those who are going to have a drive fail.

No, I'd say you cannot charge her for it if it has gone out unless you could prove that she mistreated it. Even if she did screw with it, it might be better to just write it off in the interest of maintaining good client relations. Drives are so cheap these days, with terrabyte sized drives available for not too much over $100, that buying new ones for each project's deliverables and building the cost into your pricing structure is totally reasonable.
 
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Just got the harddrive back from them and for some reason it only reads an Alias. Which a buddy of mine says sounds like an enclosure error which is from physical abuse.
 
lairhair said:
I dont need a lecture on backing stuff up this has old footage I just remembered was on their.
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Then you *do* need a lecture on backing stuff up. Letting a hard drive go out into the world without being *very* sure everything of importance on it is backed up beforehand is just plain asking for it. Sorry to be the teller of the uncomfortable truth here.

Regarding the HD failure, she might have damaged it by hot-mounting or unmounting it improperly. Many people who don't do a lot of drive-jockeying aren't aware of the "rules" for doing so (like removal: unmount from desktop, wait a few seconds, depower the drive, *then* unplug). Many a drive has been destroyed this way...
 
Turns out the issue was that the "drive" was actually a 2-Drive RAID 0 internally, and one of the two drives does not spin up (tested by pulling the drives out and putting them internally in a computer).

Should be a lesson for all who use drives - backups are cheap compared to lost data when drives go south, for any reason.
 
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