My Philips 250 GB external drive recently decided that it no longer wished to function, however, residing on the drive was a relatively important document for a project I was working on, along with some personal photos which I had stored on the drive and a few other bits and bats of less importance.

To my dismay, I thought these were now lost. However, a friend offered to have a look at the drive and see if the data could be recovered. Fortunately he managed to recover my information, for which I was most grateful, however in doing so, he had to remove the drive from the casing.

The drive came with a two year warranty, and having contacted Philips directly to replace the drive under warranty, I was informed that as the drive had been removed from the casing the warranty was now void even though all the components and original packaging has been kept and is accounted for.

This I feel is a catch 22 situation which is unfair on the consumer. Philips’ response was that the drive had to remain in the enclosure for the warranty to be valid, however, if the drive is not functioning, yet the information stored on the device is required and retrievable, surely the warranty should allow for its retrieval by the consumer before replacement?

It appears the Philips warranty only covers replacement of the drive and not data recovery, which Philips do not offer. This is often worth more to the user than the value of the drive itself and I feel this is totally unreasonable.

Dale Moorhouse