The Corrupted Hard Drive

So one morning we have a chap (widely known for his giant lack of common sense) come through the door to our office carrying his laptop. He explains that the laptop was not booting and asked if we could take a look at it.

I asked what was happening and I got a vague explanation that the Windows XP installation was cycling at boot up. At least thats what he said.

I switched on the laptop, but instead of watching the laptop attempt to start up XP I got a "NTLDR is Missing" error and nothing else.

The guy mentioned that there were several "important files" on the c: drive (a big no-no in our company, everything should be saved to a network drive and/or USB, making hard drive failure a doddle.)

Thinking that this was strange, I noticed that the laptop was making a few noises, louder than normal. I stripped down the laptop, cleaned out the internal fan and heatsink, and replaced the hard drive for good measure. I was able to reimage the laptop and get it running perfectly, just as it used to be before a user got their hands on it.

This done, out of curiosity I plugged the old hard drive in to a caddy to check it worked ok and to take a look at its contents to see if I could recover his files.

I say contents...

All I found was a half empty "Windows" directory and another folder called "To Be Moved." This folder contained lots of folders within folders with strange names and NO files.

I suspected that maybe the user had attempted an upgrade of the Operating System, had messed it up and covered his tracks by reporting a fault.

Sadly I was wrong.

When the guy finally reappeared to collect his laptop, I showed him the contents of the drive and asked him.

"Well... no" he said, some what sheepishly.

"Ok" I reply. "I thought you said the laptop was cycling through the XP boot up sequence. XP is so corrupted it wouldn't even get that far."

"Well..." he said again. "But it was."

"No it wasn't" I told him "you saw that for yourself when you brought it up earlier."

"No, I mean it was doing that. But I had someone do a restore."

The penny drops, like a ten ton sovereign on a marble staircase.

"Someone?" I enquire, not really wanting to hear the answer. "Who?"

"Oh, an external company." He answers confidently.

"What? Who?" Why?" I try to question his actions, not at all strange for this man.

"It wasn't booting and I panicked." He said.

"Panicked?" I repeated almost speachless. "Why didn't you just bring it to us?"

"I was at another site."

"We have staff at the other site" I tell him (he knows this, he's only worked there for 5 years.) "What company did you take it to?"

"My wife's" he replies. In my head I hear ten thousand IT Professionals screaming in dispair.

"Well they have completely f***ed it up." I told him pointly, not holding back. "You had no right take this to another company. These are our laptops, we issue them, we maintain them. If you have a problem with one, you bring it to us. Whatever they have done has completely corrupted the windows installation and wiped off any other files that may have been on there."
 
"What about my presentations?" He wails.

"Gone" I answer sharpely and without sympathy.

All eyes in the office boring in to him, the man smiles an embarrassed smile, apologies quietly and leaves with his laptop under his arm. For some reason he didn't hang around to complain further about his missing files.