Turned on the PC today and it was stuck at the BIOS screen trying to detect the drives. Turns out my year old Maxtor DiamondMax 22 SATA hard drive might be dead - I hardly even use it and it was mainly for storage purposes.

I had a whole bunch of unsorted photos that I took from events such as this year's bonfire night on it that I didn't back up so those are gone unfortunately. Outside of that, the other files can be downloaded again off the internet fairly easily. At least I haven't lost my Case of Shinra translation or I would have had to start all over again ^^;

On the bright side, the main computer won't consume so much power now when it's on now and, the hard drive's still under warranty by Seagate (who have taken over Maxtor now) so I might return it for a replacement at the risk of snoopy technicians stealing data - Not that there's much private stuff on the drive anyway.

Anyone ever returned dead hard drives to the manufacturer to get fixed or replaced? How do you feel about privacy when sending away a computer or storage device filled with personal files to a technician?