warranty, replace the drive and work out a way to disassemble the drive and destroy the platter/disks.
Sad drive mfgs don't/won't offer to return defective HDDs along with the replacement drive after determining the returned drive was defective under warranty replacement. Looks like a way to win customer loyalty to me after the product failure.
VAPCMD
I have a damaged Western Digital hardrive it will no longer work in the computer, it is under warrenty and they have agreed to replace it, my problem is they require I send them the damaged one before they will replace it, at first this seems fair until you consider the hard drive is full of data including all my bank details, paypal account details, credit card details etc also sensitive data related to software I was writing for a financial investment company.
Obviously just because this hardrive doesnt work in my computer does not mean data could not be retrieved from it, the warrenty on the hardrive is voided if I open the hardrive so there is no way to destroy the platters to make them unreadable. Obviously I want this hardrive replaced under its warrenty, but at the same time I don't want 500 GB of my personal data floating around where others may gain access to it. What should I do ?

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