About 3 weeks ago I sent my XPS L521x off to have the failing hard drive replaced. I requested that the old hard drive be sent back to me along with my laptop, as I have a family friend with 20+ years of working for/with Dell who is able to retrieve the data for me. Along with verbally confirming this request with the support technician who set up my case, I wrote it down on the Dell repair information page I sent with my laptop.
I received the repaired laptop after a little less than a week, and so far I have had no issues with it, but my old hard drive was not returned. I tried calling the number given to me by the first technician twice, but both times I got an automated message about the technicians being busy. I left my phone number and email address each time. The first time I did get a call back, but when I picked up all I got was an empty line. The other time my call was not returned, nor was an email sent.
I missed a call a couple of days later that was a follow-up from Dell about my repair. I called the Dell Tech Support number and talked to another technician who said he would put out a request to find my hard drive. I gave him my contact information again, but never received any calls or emails from him.
I called tech support another time, and finally talked to Andrew. He told me that my hard drive had been sent with Fedex, and gave me a tracking number for said package. I called Fedex support to report a missing package, only to realize that the shipment in question was my laptop, sans hard drive. So apparently, according to Dell, it was sent out with my laptop. Fedex has no information about any second package from Dell to me. I called back and told him this, and he said he would look into it and call me that Friday. It has now been a full week, and I haven't been contacted.
I have no way of getting the information on that hard drive back. I had been keeping backups for it on an external hard drive, but it failed completely right before my laptop started having issues, and I didn't have time to start a backup onto CDs. I understand that this is my fault, and that Dell is not responsible for any loss of software, personal info, etc. I also know that it is not standard procedure for Dell to return failed/ing hard drives after a repair.
However, I specifically requested to have a piece of hardware returned and was told several times that it would be. Since then, it seems as if Dell has been avoiding me, and will not give me a straight answer. Both times I talked to a support agent about it, they said that they thought I would get it back, and would get back to me.
Is there any chance I could ever get that hard drive back? If not, is there any recourse?