Hi guys, Happy Holidays. i need some advice here. My friend HHD stop working two days ago and that HDD containes a lot of information, for example, 10 movies, some programs installations, such as, adobe CS3 and music. In fact he downloaded everything from the internet, so you know most of it is illegal. anyway the HDD has a 5 year warranty so he can replace it, but he wants to know if he send it back, would he get in trouble or what can happen??. any advice would be nice.

to be honest, I don't know if the companies scour the data since I don't work for any HDD company
(I think it would be illegal too if they did)
but since the contents are illegal, your friend or "friend" should buy another hdd instead of replacing it under warranty and I believe your friend deserves it
on side note, are you sure or is your friend sure that the hdd is dead and not just a corrupted master boot record?

and happy holidays to you too

i dont know, he told me everything was working good until a message apper in windows saying that a problem occur writing some information in the HDD and the computer froze, he wait for 2 minutes and then he turn it off and then he turn it on again and then before load windows XP a black scree apperared saying that the disk status was bad, and have to backup data and replace. then he disconnect the slave "the faulty HDD" and then turn on the pc and it was working fine again, but everytime he connect the slave it wont boot.

when he connect the faulty HDD it spins and everything and it doesnt make any strange noises. but windows wont boot up

I wouldn't send it in, it's like taking "illegal?" pictures in to get developed, if they find it they can turn it in.. He's not going to get any time, but theres a chance he could get fined.. Probably a small risk either way, but he should just cough up the $ for the movies, if he does happen to get into trouble it won't be worth it..

I think it's likely the hard disk is out of order
seems like the BIOS can't detect the faulty drive and causing the system halt

well he can get into the BIOS and he can see the HDD in the BIOS but it wont load windows

and once the windows was doign a cheking and it said like a few sector were unreadable. and then windows took like 15 minutes to load. but he didnt wait and he disconnect it and windows load like usual "fast"

so it pretty much sums up to bad sectors, meaning bad hdd
it's up to your friend what your friend wants to do with the faulty hdd

I think some hdd companies have software (and third party as well) that can help their hdds "patch up" bad sectors if not fixable
(which means it creates a dummy file that occupies the bad sectors, make the hdd not utilize those sectors or something of that nature)

also depends where the bad sectors are located
(it could mean trouble if the bad sector(s) happen to be at the MBR)

and lastly, it's up to your friend if your friend wants to perform possible data recovery before before any attempts to fix the hdd

and what utilities he can use, his drive is a WD HDD 500G 7200RPM 16MB SATA2 WD5000KS

anybody else have any advice?? thanks