@captainsnowball First, Invest in Acronis. This is your most important CYA tool. Make a bootable using either a disk or thumb drive On a customers computer, make a backup image. This preserves exact partition information including data, without sacrificing extra space for sector information (although you can do sector by sector). Your best secure erase software is "Eraser". You have 40 different secure erase methods to choose from. You can also secure erase files vs the whole disc. https://eraser.heidi.ie/ USB to SATA is not very efficient, any drive information gets lost in translating between the USB bridge and the SATA interface. Invest in an older Dell Latitude series laptop with an "ESATA" interface. This is your best tool. The Dell Latitude E5440 supports traditional and UEFI bios. The single quickest way to back up a hard drive is to take out the customer's SATA hard drive, and plug it into an ESATA dock and use Acronis to make a direct image of it. You can then safely format and install Windows 10...
Ironically, Microsoft disagreed with Consumer Reports claiming poor reliability on Surface Pros. https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/microsof...-surface/132728/consumer-reports-microsoft-surface-dead-last-reliability
This Trump card move is another one of the President's tactics to try to leverage better trade with China. He has failed with his other sanctions. For example, China doesn't need American ginseng or pork, and beef is better sourced from Australia. This move however, may put a small dent (however small it may be) in China's economy because ZTEs shutdown affects the global market. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ztes-operations-shutdown-stymies-major-phone-customers-1525957596 ZTE is huge in budget phones globally, but not a big player in China, which is ruled by XiaoMi and Huawei as local Chinese brands. Lenovo, Samsung, and Huawei are Apple's biggest competitors in China. Also you should know that Google isn't allowed in China. PERIOD. Android phones are raw Android. No Google play services, no Google App store, No Google Apps. There are at least 10 different Android app stores consumers can choose purchasing apps from. There is no popular American social media allowed. No facebook, no snapchat, no twitter....
Umm... not to be profiling, but user has a Russian name. That normally doesn't raise a red flag, but compounded with software with information gathering built in to it sounds fishy.
@nick, most bad hard drives I have encounter do not trip SMART monitoring. When SMART errors are triggered, it is often too late and much damage has already occurred. The big 3 manufacturers WD, Seagate, and Hitachi have DOS bootable utilities that are customized for their particular drives to perform extensive surface tests and can try to remap bad sectors and/or move data from a bad sector to a known good sector. On a hard drive, there are often "good" sectors that are used as reserved and not mapped as usable so that these utilities can try to "fix" your drive before data is ultimately lost. You should add this to your guide, as what you have included, although informative, does not really repair or recover your drive.
Hi Robert, The best place to ask this question is to contact the store directly. Meta does not have direct relation with the store and inventory related issues. Thanks for your understanding.