Sometime at the end of March this year my USB HDD started throwing out mysterious errors which soon revealed themselves as disk blocks turning bad. I wasn't too surprised. This was a need-of-the-hour purchase from Supreme Computers opposite Chandni Chowk Metro Station (at the Air India building) at Kolkata around 3 years ago. A 160 GB HDD at around 3000 INR. It had served well and there was no reason to feel unhappy.

At about the same time I noticed that the Staples store at SGS Mall, Camp, Pune had an offer on Imation HDDs. 320 GB for around 2000 INR. Not really a bad deal. I got myself one and then mounted it. Most of these drives contain a bunch of Windows specific stuff and, surprisingly enough this also had a folder called 'Recycled' (link to a zip archive on dropbox) which contained images like these (link to a file on dropbox). This was surprising because it isn't something that is mine and it was on a HDD that was nicely shrink-wrapped.

So I sent in an email to Imation - they make it nicely difficult to find an email/tech support to write in to. That was on the 6th of April. On April 12, Imation Singapore Support (bumped via the US tech/sales support) suggests that I contact the India office. On April 18 they can only provide a telephone number of the board and no email or, tech support detail in order to figure out how a folder like this can be present inside a shrink wrapped box. Till now no one has actually stated that they have looked at the issue and figured out whom I should contact. All that has happened is geographical ping pong with the probable assumption that this is consumer goods and hence probably not to be bothered much about.

John Poelstra's blog post reminded me that I shouldn't really accept this stupidity.