I don't understand why companies can't leave hard drives alone. My little brother recently sent in a Dell Studio for a keyboard repair. He went against my advice and went through Best Buy for the RMA instead of doing it himself. He signed a bunch of documents denying liability and giving Dell/BB the right to do whatever they wanted with the machine, pretty much.

When he got the laptop back, he was told that the "hard drive was going bad", so they proactively replaced it with a new one with a default image. This made me really mad, but they don't care or understand. Even if it was going bad, that was still HIS hard drive. The computer was still under warranty so they should have shipped the old disk back with the new.

I don't trust anyone else to clean out disks on my behalf. There are far too many instances of negligence on the matter. If the drive really was going bad, they should have sent it back and let me destroy and dispose of it personally.

How do I know that they don't have a FBI hookup that scans all of the "bad" drives before refurbishing or disposing, or how do I know that they don't have a contract with the MPAA/RIAA to allow their anti-piracy goons to do that? How do I know it doesn't pass through a group of teenagers who parse it for nudes, as happens at most computer repair shops?

Yeah, it sucks pretty bad. My family is completely indifferent to it and it's probably too late to call and try to get something done about it. : (