A follow up on my problems with my western digital 500 gb external hard drive. I contacted western digital support twice and it took a month for them to reply (they guarantee 2 day response) and their response was a random selection from their FAQ and instructions to click on ‘Finish Submitting Question’ if they did not solve the problem, of course there was no such link.
I turned to the retailer Pixmania who tell you to return any faulty item to the manufacturer, which as I found out is against European consumer law which says that retailers are obliged to take back faulty goods and in the case of online retailers pay the postage incurred in returning them and that this should be the consumers first port of call. Eventually after much difficulty I was able to force pixmania to accept the return (their legal obligation) but had to agree to having the hard drive repaired which I was very unhappy with ( I find it hard to have much faith in a repaired hard drive) but unfortunately is acceptable under European consumer law. So I’m sending the drive off to France more then a little apprehensively as I’ve googled Pixmania returns and found out that they seem to have a truly dreadful record of appalling customer service. I’ll keep you posted how I get on.