Laptop hard drive RMA?

[Eli]

Storage or mobile computing, hmm... Let's try here...

I recently picked up a used Toshiba Tecra S1 laptop. No original reciept, no mention of warranty. The stock 40GB died recently (it stopped spinning up, no signs of life). As far as I can tell that model of hard drive (MK4019GAX) should have a three year warranty, and the laptop is definitely less than three years old since this model was released in mid 2003 if memory serves. What are the odds that I can get the drive replaced?

[SeanC]

Eli,

The best thing you can do is to look up on the Toshiba website if your laptop is still under warranty.

It's at this link:

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/t...ceghdgngdgnj.0

Enter your part number and serial number from the bottom and it will tell you whether it is still under warranty or not.

Usually the standard Toshiba warranty is 1 year so you might be out of luck, hopefully not though.

Sean

[Joel Kleppinger]

Remove the hard drive and get the serial number then go here:
http://www.pcs-sj.com/rma.htm

If it's under warranty, they'll send the RMA.

[DanU]

Keep in mind that many OEM products ARE NOT warrantied by the original manufacturer, but by the OEM/system builder. E.g. if the drive was pulled from an HP laptop, the warranty will be from HP, not from Toshiba.

[Joel Kleppinger]

Actually, most laptop hard drives are still warranted by the drive manufacturer. It is possible that for a particular hard drive, the manufacturer will refuse warranty (pointing to the OEM, such as HP in your example), but in most cases they do cover the drive. I've personally RMA'd a couple of drives and instructed many other people to RMA drives for laptops that were out of warranty.

Western Digital is the one company I've found so far that is a pretty hard stickler to only warrantying retail drives. They have a warranty tool on their website so you can see what their warranty policy is for any drive serial number.