[Gllug] Linux invalidates your HP warranty

[Bernard Peek]

In message <87odm9zk9t.fsf at hades.wkstn.nix>, Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> 
writes
>On 30 Mar 2007, Bernard Peek stated:
>> The point of re-imaging the drive as the first step in diagnosis is to
>> restore the software to a known good state. If the machine runs
>> normally at that point it can be returned as fixed.
>
>And if it doesn't, oops, they just blew your data away for no good
>reason.
>
>Isn't this a very good way to piss off lots of customers?

As far as I know it's how all the major PC suppliers run triage. If you 
send a PC back for repair there's a very good chance that it will come 
back reset to ex-factory state. Apart from speeding up diagnosis it also 
prevents embarrassing incidents where the engineer discovers unsavoury 
pictures on a machine sent for repair.

Certainly when I was running an internal repair centre we re-imaged any 
machine that we though might have a software problem, but that was in a 
place where there wasn't supposed to be any data on the internal drives, 
it should all have been on the servers.

If your data is particularly precious then you can probably arrange to 
send the machine in without its disk, and that's the safest option if 
you don't have a recent backup.

I think in this particular case it's worth restating that the original 
article doesn't say that HP weren't going to support the warranty. It 
says that they weren't going to accept it back with Linux still 
installed. If they had said that Linux invalidated the warranty you can 
be sure that the article would have said so, it would make it a much 
stronger story and the journalist wouldn't have missed the opportunity 
to include it. So to me it looks as if the article was a space-filler on 
a slow news day.



-- 
Bernard Peek
bap at shrdlu.com

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