digg

Facebook Connect Join Digg About

Best Buy Resells Customer's Hard Drive watch!

youtube.com — Interesting story. Too bad the guy's voice is so annoying.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 8, 2006

Digg DudeWhat is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg surfaces the best stuff as submitted and voted on by the community. Take the Tour to learn more.

106 Comments

show profanity settings
expand all
  • affanjam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+133That reporter need to stop EMPHASIZING everything.
  • tidu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+126He went to this Best Buy to have his hard drive replaaaaaaced.
    ...Best Buy assued him the old hard drive would be- destroooooyed.
    ...At a flea market in Alsip, Illinoooooois!
  • 1337jared, on 10/12/2007, -3/+66I would feel HORRIBLE if SOMEONE got all of MY information. If I EVER wanted to get my hard drive REPLACED, I would DO IT myself.
  • ECas123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+47wow he really likes saying HARD DRIVE
  • BlackCow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+38How many geek squad workers does it take to replace a hard drive?
  • tidu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+34near the end:
    "these are our golf cart pictures"
    wtf?
  • meshgiath, on 10/12/2007, -2/+31It was like listening to Sienfeld stand-up slowed down to 1/2 speed.
  • Maxtrosity, on 10/12/2007, -1/+30i hear thermite disposes hd's pretty good

    all in all, i bet it was just some naughty employee trying to make a buck
  • Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -2/+29lol, I couldnt help but laugh at how he says haarddrive! and cuustomer
  • davidod87, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27I'm so ***** glad I got to see the reporter's face at the end, just so I can imagine punching it.
  • coyforce, on 10/12/2007, -3/+29I'm sure it was one of the employees just trying to make a quick buck, but best buy is going to have to take the bad publicity for it. This reminds me a lot of that lady that worked for sprint and would not track the cell phone that was in the suv with an abducted kid. I actually feel bad for the companies that have to deal with these idiot employees.
  • nickerbocker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+26Shopping there is one thing. Having Best Buy/Geek Squad fix your computer is another. My mom had a hard drive start to go out and I only took it there because it was warrantied by them. I had to demand the old one back to get data off of it. They ended up letting her keep the old hard drive. This was after they tried to sell us a back up service for $200 but emphasised that I couldn't do it because the hard drive was failing. I have SpinRite now for that kind of thing. Geek Squad is a joke.
  • nonpromqueen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25I used to work at Best Buy. This sort of thing happened all the time.

    Guys would replace better parts with ***** ones and keep the customers parts for themselves.

    Don't trust Best Buy!
  • nuteredardvark, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25I work at the local computer shop (about 20 miles from the nearest best buy) and we have actually had geek squad bring computers into us to fix.
  • halleyscomet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23@revenge7

    Format the Drive?? Oh, that's a hoot.

    Formatting just deletes the FAT. Not even repartitioning the drive will destroy any data, it just removes the FAT and the Partition Table.

    Norton Utilities has had the ability to recover lost partitions and formated drives for quite some time. You won't get a fully functional "You can boot form this" drive and if the drive was badly fragmented you won't recover entire files, but fragments.

    And Norton isn't even the most robust utility for that kind of data recovery.

    night141, anyone who tells you that formatting the drive is enough does NOT know what they're doing.

    Now, a "Low Level" format gets you to a far more secure state. Instead of just writing a new FAT, it actually deletes the data and overwrites it with a string of zeros. High end forensics software can still recover some of that data by analyzing the residual charge of the individual sectors, which is why there's the US government standard for hard drive erasure.

    The entire drive is overwritten multiple times with different patterns. The Mac OS 10.4.x Disk Utility comes with this capability as one of the "Erase" options, but you need to get add on software to do it in Windows. Neither OS will let you erase the current Boot Volume.

    There's even a Linux distribution (too lazy to look it up) that is a bootable CD, that can erase the connected drives with user selectable levels of security.

    Personally, I just dismantle the drive and use the platters as coasters and the magnets on my refrigerator. Faster, simpler and you get free coasters out of the deal!
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+21Hah, that's my YouTube account that has that video! I posted the videos months ago. Teaches me to be patient to get diggs!
  • jefffm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Wellll, my mom didn't trust me to fix her computer once, so she took it to Best Buy to get it fixed. They said it was a bad hard drive, and she had to buy a new one. They gave her the old one back, and I'm still using it. It was just a corrupt ntfs partition.
  • statikuz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Just doing a regular format won't do the job for anyone that's determined to get your junk off your hard drive. Use something like:

    http://dban.sourceforge.net/
  • EBFoxbat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Please resell my hard drive so I can sue the ***** out of you. Please?
  • LouisFarrakan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13I returned a refrigerator to Best Buy. Three weeks later some guy calls me and says he bought it at a yard sale with my wife's head still in the freezer! Still frozen! What great insulation! I should have kept it!
  • fugazi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15Not everyone can plug a few wires in.

    Anyone know why they replaced the HD if it still worked?
  • halleyscomet, on 10/12/2007, -6/+18@BlackCow

    Five

    1 To Open the computer case
    1 to unplug the drive
    1 to mirror the drive.
    1 to install the new drive
    1 to sell the old drive at a flea market.
  • halleyscomet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12The sad thing is, I've heard of this happening to a number of Best Buy customers over the last few months. One of the reports I saw dug a little deeper, and found out that Best Buy corporate had been contracting out their hard drive disposal, and that company was then reselling the drives.

    The only consequence I know of anyone facing is that Best Buy switched to processing all used drives internally.
  • burnt1ce85, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12Sue bestbuy and thank the guy who returned their hard drive. that was uber nice of him to do that. seriously
  • greatcaffeine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Great story, but man... that reporter needs to be fired!
  • MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11I purchased a brand new drive from BB a few months ago, and when I got home and installed the drive, I found that it had a full copy of windows 2000 already installed on it along with someone's documents and other very personal information.

    I took it back and they denied there being any files on it after their geek squad loaded it up. I did get my money back, and I assume they formatted it and put it back into the box and sold it as new. That was the last time I ever went into BB.
  • MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Same thing, they denied every owning a shrink wrap machine. Walked to where I can see behind the counter and there it was!
  • hangtown2004, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Yes I have fixed several friends computers that were in the geek squad hands and these people were charged fo several things they not only didnt need but were FREE downloadable utilitys that you can get with a FREE licences right on the net. Then they charged separatly to install them. What a rip the are
  • gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I remember when I bought a "GeForce 3 Ti200" from BestBuy. When I got home I opened the box to find some crappy Intel card. I was livid. BestBuy sold the original one, and then accepted a return without even checking the original product. They had even re-shrinkwrapped the box! When I went in to return it they denied that they would reshrinkwrap the box but replaced it nonetheless. Smells fishy to me.
  • klawz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"==== Just a simple format will do the trick. There is a possibility that you could use forensics to recover the data off of a hard drive that was wiped using a simple format. But nobody would go through the effort of a forensic data recover like that, on the off chance that a used hard drive they purchased from a total stranger would contain data valuable enough to make all the effort worth it.===== "

    You see, this type of dis-information is what gets this type of story to the front page over and over again. Repeat after me, formatting a hard drive is like ripping just the table of contents out of a book, and rest of the book is still there. Doing a 'deep' format, where it erases all the data, and takes much longer, will do somewhat as this guy is stating. But the forensics stuff, that's for when the drive had been ERASED and formatted at the same time, maybe even a few times. I've recoverd "formatted" hard drives in less than 5 mins, and recovered "data" of a erased and formatted drive, with shareware tools - it's when the drive has been erased with 1 and 0 patterns 7 or more times (old DOD requirements) then it becomes a challenge, but the data can alwasy be recovered (like the guy is saying, at this point, then it's what the hell is the data worth taking 5-50k to recover one file, national secrets? most people won't bother, but the simple "fast format" that most people do because they are inpatient - can be "undone" in less than 5 mins - so do yourself a favor, format it using the LONG format, do it several times, then ship it off to your ebay buyer, then you're somewhat more protected - even better, destroy it physically if there is anything worth a crap on it, even if it was formatted.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9What's the best way to wipe data off a disk so that others cannot undelete or view it at a later time? I got an old laptop I'm ready to sell over the internets.

    And no im not taking a magnet or hammer to it.
  • cougar618, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8He sounded like he could have voiced Trisha Takanauwa (sp?) from Family Guy.
  • coredump0x01, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Download Knoppix live linux CD from http://knoppix.net (free) boot into it, click on Konsole and run the command sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda This will fill the hard drive with junk random data. If you want to be sure your data is all gone run sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda count=5 set count to whatever you want, It indicates the number of times the drive will be wiped. Depending on how big the drive is and how high you set count to, This will take a long time. So don't do it on battery power.
  • f8pc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Out of curiousity what needed to be done? That is pretty funny though.
  • foolfromhell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I remember the last time this came on Digg. was just a blog post then. Nice that it got the publicity that it has now
  • spoid_, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Why didn't your friends install these utilities? Oh, they didn't know about them or how to use them? They're performing a service that someone is obviously willing to pay for. Nothing wrong with this. The hard drive, however, is an obvious problem.

    Sometimes I feel like telling my father in law to go best buy because I get tired of doing this kind of crap for him.
  • gotamd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6If Best Buy told them that the data (in fact the whole drive) would be destroyed then it's not their fault and they're not being irresponsible.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Don't you mean HARD drives?
  • Peacedog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Ok people if they were upgrading their hard drive then they probably wanted the data copied over. Not typically a common operation for an elderly couple, would you think? That is why they did not destroy the hard drive. They should have taken the old hard drive with them, but they were assured by Best Buy that it would be destroyed. Hence the problem. So the old couple not deleting the data has nothing to do with this story.

    And to top it all off, Best Buy probably charged them for some fake disposal fee.
  • mit578, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5You should encrypt your personal data . Then back it up !encrypted back up and wipe the old copy on disk in question.(With like shedding program. Like PGP, and reformat)
  • Jaydude765, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Buy a new hard drive for it and keep the old one. If someone really wants your data they can probably get it unless you completly destroy the platters.

    Though if your not that paranoid a low level format will set everything to 0 rendering a fair few of the un-deleters out there usless (i think).
  • halleyscomet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@tj_walker_dvt

    Most people don't have the skills to do that themselves.

    How many of the pople on Digg can replace thier own Mufler? Hmmmm?
  • takeda, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I wonder what's with the guy who let them know about that and sent the hard drive.
    Did they even gave him some reward for letting them know about it? The report says, that they informed major credit bureaus, so they basically treated that guy as a potential thief, which is sad.
  • halleyscomet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@EvilFerret

    If this were an isolate incident, I'd say you were probably right.

    Sadly, it's been happening all over the country, and Best Buy eventually came out and admitted that they were outsourcing the disposal of the used drives. That company was just reselling them, often without even reformatting them.

    Best Buy is now processing the drives internally, or at least they were the last time anyone asked them about it.
  • Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5actually a proper format, done once does nothing, I know because I accedentally formatted the wrong drive once and got everything back (proper format)

    your options are this
    delete files(not very secure)drive to the middle of nowhere and burry it(very secure)
  • jasonvw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Probably just needed a bigger one. At the computer store where I work, if a customer fails to pick up their computer, after 4 months we part it out and sell the parts including the hard drive, but we do a wipe to zeros before reselling it. Not perfect, but better than leaving the data in tact. Although, data like that should never be on a hard drive in an unencrypted form.
  • iruel, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7that old couple seemed like ass holes to me. they should have atleast compensated the guy who called them. I mean there isn't really that much to worry about if the guy took the effort to call you and ask you what you wanted. "oh no identity theft!"
  • takeda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4From the report looks like they told him that they'll drill hole in the hard drive.
    You don't neet to be an IT expert to drill a hole in theHD yourself?
    If you would want to destroy an old credit card, would you give it to third party and assume they destroyed it or would you do it yourself?
  • raptordrew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4News flash! Best Buy found to be partaking in unsafe/immoral ventures for profit, without informing their customers of the right way to get things done!
  • kingfoot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4glad i dont part my computers to best buy. any HDD ive ever had, ive kept, any that failed...i wiped em, destroyed the disks, and then played with the fun magnets! to get rid of old chips and parts, i sell them to people who want them...lol best buy is a joke. geek squad is a joke. learn to use a computer and secure it.
  • Fetching more discussions...
    Show 51 - 100 of 106 discussions

  • Add a Comment

    Login or register to comment!
    Or, sign-in super fast with your Facebook account ...


© Digg Inc. 2009 — Content created and posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain | Terms of Use Updated | Privacy Policy
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.