When Geek Squad took a look at the drive, they told her they wouldn't replace it as it was working fine. Sure it was, that's why Windows boots up just fine and there are no bad blocks found by Spinrite or badblocks(8).</sarcasm>

I told her to raise hell until she got her drive replaced, and to tell them to run sector tests on the drives because it's very plain to see that the drive is failing. Just because the S.M.A.R.T. status shows up fine doesn't mean the drive is fine. She finally got it replaced and I finally got her data back to her. Oh yeah, and they left no OS on it – I had to use the Toshiba recovery DVD and install all of the updates myself. I guess Geek Squad doesn't really care if a person's computer is up and running and safe or not.

Speaking of up-and-running, a second customer with a failing hard drive went through the same deal with me. Apparently his drive was failing bad enough because Geek Squad didn't bitch about it being fine, and just replaced it. I put on the ticket that the computer should be brought back when it is up and running so that I could copy the data back at no additional charge (I only charged 1 hour of labor for the whole recovery).

He brought the machine back today and there's no operating system on it at all. Geek Squad had told him that I could copy what I salvaged off the drive back onto the new drive to make it work again. Sure, that's going to fly. So now I have to charge an additional hour of labor to reinstall and update Windows because Geek Squad… I don't know. I just don't like (most) Geek Squad agents. I understand that there are some of you out there that are like me, and that's fine, but as an organization, Geek Squad is pretty shabby.

© DjLizard for DjLizard.net, 2007. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Best Buy, Geek Squad, hard drive failure, Incompetence, Ranting

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh