Western Digital 250 Gig Hard Drive crashes at 6 months, 1 year Warranty not supported

I purchased a Western Digital 250 Gig Enhanced IDE Hard Drive. It crashed just a few days short of 6 months from the day I purchased it. The package is clearly marked with a 1 Year Warranty, but when you contact Western Digital they state their warranty starts at date of manufacture. When I purchased this Hard Drive it was out of warranty for 3 months already. I have contacted the Circuit City Store, where I purchased this (3410 Alpine NW, Walker, Michigan 49544). I talked to the Manager there; He told me I would have to deal with the manufacturer, and it didn’t make any difference that they had not rotated their stock well enough to keep this from happening. I called the Manufacturer, three & a half weeks ago. The woman I talked to at first told me there wasn’t anything I could do about it being out of warranty, but after continuing to point out the written warranty inside the package clearly states the “limited warranty period shall commence on the purchase date appearing on your purchase receipt”. She told me that in some cases they might cover the warranty. She told me to fax a copy of the sales receipt to her and she would forward it to another dept. She said I could check the status of my warranty on their website. If it was approved it should take 3 days. 4 days later, there was no change in the status. I went thru their website support accessing the link “note for out of limited warranty drives” , which states that by sending a jpg file showing the dated receipt, they would extend the warranty to the original 1 Year. I did this three weeks ago, and repeated the request a week and a half ago. I did receive an e-mail stating that they had received my email. They would refer it to the appropriate dept. and they would contact me on the status of my request. Well, they did not contact me and they have not changed the status of the warranty. For many years I felt that Western Digital made the best hard drives, but now I have changed my mind on that. I am Extremely Disappointed in their manufacturing and their customer assistance. I will Never buy another product with their name on and I will tell everyone I can about the Pathetic Customer Care. This terrible experience only compounds the fact that I lost everything that I had on the hard drive. At first I thought, that would be the biggest problem that I would be facing, but that was just the beginning. I am looking for another Hard Drive now, I have had many computers since my first one in 1973. I have helped many other people with their computers, and I will now have quite a story to pass on.

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Just to add to my previous post. The whole thing about the warranty still sucks, but at least I figured out the problem was a bad USB cable (YES, believe it or not..), which makes me think WD may have skimped out on the USB cable costs which is a very important piece of the external hard drive.

Anyway, I tried an external dock AND another cable and they both work fine.

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I'm currently dealing with Western Digital about a 500 gig external drive that went bad. I bought it last April so it's been about 10 months and their site says it is out of warranty --- ridiculous. Why should the consumer have to play the luck game when it comes to getting a hard drive? Last I checked, warranties started on RECEIPT date. What a load of..

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Not sure if missery loves company, but I have three Western digiatal drives all crashed in less than a year. Two were in USB external cases, one was an internal drive. These were to be my backup for all of our digital pictures and laptop files. Support is pathetic. I too will never buy another drive from Western digital. Pass it on.

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The same thing happened to me - WD refuses to repair the item or refund my money but they so generously offered to let me pay a couple hundred dollars for them to retrieve my information off of the defective external hard drive they sold me. It came with a 1 year warranty which apparently expired about 3 months before I even purchased the #@#& product!

What I want to know is if this company can be held responsible for their behavior. Not only will I never buy anything from Western Digital again but I will tell everyone I can not to. Its just the worst! And I know there are people out there who just complain about service all the time for no reason but I lost TONS of important files and whatnot on this thing, not to mention the money spent on it in the first place and whatever i have to spend to make up for what I lost. Which isnt possible because I'm not made out of money. (Maybe if I were operating a sham company that sold defective products then charged people for fixing them...)