“Your hard drive is defective”

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capivara
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“Your hard drive is defective”

Post by capivara »

When Adri, a ham radio friend of mine, brought his Asus X550 series notebook for repair to Mycom.nl (a Dutch computer shop), all he asked them to do was to replace a little piece of plastic. This plastic clamp, designed to keep the Ethernet cable in place, is known to be very fragile and often the first part to fail. Because the notebook was still under warranty, he didn't expect much problems.

He was wrong. Very wrong.

Adri is legally blind and uses CentOS in text mode. No Cinnamon, MATE or KDE, let alone Windows – being blind Adri doesn't have much use for a desktop environment. He took his time to make these things clear to the personnel because the know-how of the people working there varies wildly. Sometimes you run into great guys with a lot of knowledge, but more often than not you run into wannabe nerds who were hired because during the job interview they showed that they could play DOOM and double-click an icon.

Furthermore their world is limited to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS; anything else is, well, scary. I experienced this first hand when I looked for a new notebook and explained that Windows would be overwritten with Linux immediately. If I would have told them that I just put rat poison in their coffee machine, the looks on their faces might well have been the same.

We're writing August 10: the notebook was sent to Asus. On August 25 Adri got an e-mail from Mycom telling him that his hard drive was broken too and that Asus insisted on replacing that part too.

“My hard drive is fine. I don't want Asus to replace it.”
“But Asus says it's broken and needs to be replaced.”
“I only asked to replace the plastic clamp. No other parts need to be replaced, else I would have asked for it.”
“Sorry, Asus' policy is to replace everything that needs to be replaced, whether you asked for it or not.”
“This is crazy. It's like bringing my car to a garage to have the exhaust pipe replaced, they notice that my car radio is defective, and force me to have the radio replaced too.”
“Uhmmm, well... uhmmmm.... we'll get back to you.”

On September 3 Mycom contacted Adri once more.

“Your hard drive is broken. It needs to be replaced too.”
“For the love of God, NOT AGAIN! The hard drive was fine! Just replace the damned piece of plastic!”
“Sorry, Asus' policy is to replace everything that needs to be replaced, whether you asked for it or not.”
“Ok, ok, replace the #%*@# hard drive then, but I insist that you return the original drive.”
“If you want the original drive back, this repair won't be under warranty and Asus will charge you for the repairs.”
“Let me guess, Asus' policy?”
“Uhmm, yes.”

In the end Adri got his notebook back on October 20 and with the original drive. Months of waiting, months of debating and fighting, warranty lost, and a bill of 80 euros.

BTW: the system booted without a hitch. A check on the logs revealed that the people at Asus booted the system twice. The first time they needed just 33 seconds into the boot sequence to conclude that the hard drive was totally FUBAR, the second time they had been staring at the screen for about 6 minutes. In amazement. Or in terror. We'll probably never know. Log:

Code: Select all

Aug 19 10:39:58 asus kernel: imklog 5.8.10, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
Aug 19 10:40:31 asus abrt: detected unhandled Python exception in '/usr/bin/pyzor'
Oct  8 17:08:20 asus kernel: imklog 5.8.10, log source = /proc/kmsg started.
Oct  8 17:14:05 asus kernel: r8169 0000:04:00.2: eth0: link down
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Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
All my computers are in Mint condition.
exploder
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Re: “Your hard drive is defective”

Post by exploder »

What a rip off! They turned a simple warranty claim into such a bad experience and lost a customer in the process. It's clear there was nothing at all wrong with the hard drive. Where do they get off charging for fixing the Ethernet port?
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Re: “Your hard drive is defective”

Post by Jedinovice »

I have two ASUS laptops - both x200 models.

The original X200 needed Mint 17.0 but everything installed fine. Actually, not quite. I bought the 4GB, 4 core model and it needed a BIOS update so Mint Linux would boot. The ASUS service center did it for me there and then before I bought form the vendor. I bought at the local high tech mall where every vendor and supplier hangs out together and the only place - really - to buy IT here in Surabaya especially if you want a Windows free machine.

My wife was kind and bought me a second dual core X200 (long story as to why) and this gave me much more grief. It turns out that there was at least two editions of the X200 laptop using different components. I had to install, after much guessing, the RC candidate of the 4.2 kernel to get the laptop to work properly. I am now on the stable release of 4.2. I posted here on the intricacies of installing Mint KDE on an ASUS x200.

I since read that ASUS are rolling with Microsoft on the whole 'secure boot' thing and cosying up very close to Big Daddy. Once upon a time ASUS was pretty standard, Linux friendly. I get the impression that Microsoft is leaning on them to be a lot less Linux friendly. I have purchased ASUS and am happy with my laptops but I would hesitate before buying from them again. This tale confirms my suspicions. I don't think ASUS can be relied upon for Linux these days.
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