20 Mar 2009 danielsmw   » (Journeyer)

My experience with Iomega


A few months ago, I bought a 1 TB USB Hard Drive from Iomega. I was very happy with it at the time. I used it for backups on both my Fedora box and, once I got it, my Macbook.

Then it broke.

But I wasn’t too upset. Those things happen. So I contacted Iomega and got an RMA number after troubleshooting. I sent it back, they sent me one, and I got it about a week ago. I plugged it in…

And it was broken. The replacement drive was broken. They didn’t believe me online at first. In fact, the Mac support guy basically just gave up on me. The next day, I contacted a Linux support guy, who was far more helpful and didn’t treat me like an illiterate moron. We played around with trying to reformat it using fdisk and mkfs (which I had done with the Mac guy, but he didn’t know what I was talking about). When mkfs kept giving us errors, he accepted the inevitable and gave setup a free-of-charge, next-day shipping replacement.

Well, gee, that was nice of him. I was pretty happy with that. Iomega had redeemed itself.

I opened my new hard drive with a good deal of excitement today. I plugged it into my laptop and setup a backup real quick before I had to leave. It was running fine when I got back, so I went about my business.

Always paranoid about my disk space, I ran df -H to make sure my downloads would have plenty of room to my internal hard disk. That’s when I realized that Iomega had sent me a drive 500 GB too small. So I contacted them again.

The strange thing is that the serial number on this third hard drive actually is supposed to correspond to a 1 TB drive. They probably put the wrong drive in the casing at the refurbishing center, I guess. Either way, the guy had strong evidence to not believe me. It was a Mac guy, again, and he tried to step me through all the ways I had just told him that the drive was only 500 GB. Eventually, as he was searching through his knowledge base for heaven-know-what, I showed him the partition table that fdisk gave me. Confused, not understanding what the console even was, he apologized and setup another drive shipment.

So that’s where I am. Hopefully this one will be right.

Lessons Learned:
1. Knowing how to use fdisk is well, well worth it
2. Don’t buy anything else from Iomega
3. The tech support people oftentimes are just searching through knowledge bases and don’t actually know what’s going on… unless you get the Linux guy.
4. The tech guys really are trying to be nice. Let them feel like they’re telling you what to do, and don’t let them know that you’re 10 minutes ahead.

Posted in Uncategorized

Syndicated 2009-03-13 00:01:27 from Reflected Pensiveness

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