Recently, I had opportunity to take advantage of an extended warranty on my laptop purchased a few years ago. In hindsight, I probably would have experienced fewer headaches had I cancelled at the time the terms were altered from replacement to repair terms. However, the warranty was still in force and the hard drive on my laptop crashed, which only formated to 35% then quit. So I called the company who maintains my warranty, GE-Zurich, to obtain service.
Enduring 45 min + of following the prodecures, we finally concluded what I had told him at the beginning of the call, but evidently he was either not listening or ignored me. He then instructed me to run the recovery program and load software. Same results: format failed at 35%. The tech was speechless, his script OBVIOUSLY didn’t cover this issue. When I asked to have this issue escallated, he argued with me then finally told me someone would call me in 3 days. Out of time and patience, I agreed to at least wait the3 days. 4 days later, no call back. By this time, I hadn’t had use of my laptop for 2 weeks. When calling the center again, my concerns were met with callous excuses and NO apologies. The tech asked me what method I used to remove the partition,I answered with Fdisk. He had me repeat my procedure 3 times then placed me on hold for about 10 mins. When he finally returned, he told me that method had physically damaged the drive. Apparently, this tech didn’t know any better than the first. I had followed the same Industry Standard procedure for Fdisk from the boot floppy to the letter. Finally, my call was escallated and the center agreed to RMA my unit which, unfortunaltely was returned in even worse condition than before. By thistime, I had been without the unit for 3 weeks, but they only agreed to RMA the unit again.