First off - Amiga4ever - love the Avatar

That has always been the best photo of KB!
Anyhoo - i agree, we need to all have common sense about buying on ebay or wherever, that's why I mentioned before to just ask for the money back for the drive (forget the postage) because when buying you need take the seller at his word regarding condition etc, he wouldn't intentionally sell a faulty drive but his packing more or less done it to death. Yeah, he probably took a chance on shoddy packaging thinking "it will be allright" but has come a cropper. When something like this happens (especially when there is no postage insurance - you could have paid for that you know - then you would have got all your money back, including the postage and the seller would still have had his sale) you just need to come to a sensible arangement between buyer and seller. I've been selling IT stuff on eBay since 2000 / 2001 as well as buying and as a seller, I would never intentionally mispack or mis-sell something. I also have a 100% rating and no Neutrals, so I feel reasonably qualified about what I'm saying here (also I'm an IT Service Manager, so I kinda know how to approach this kind of stuff).
Seller - has the responsibility to list the aution as accurately as possible, pack the goods properly and send via agreed method
Buyer - has the responsibilty to query anything he feelshe would need to know about (i.e - if a laptop is for sale and it doesn't say it's working - ask the question), pay for the goods up front and pay for any postage insurance they believe necessary to cover potential losses.
Did you ever think that you would be in the same situation that you are in just now if the drive hadn't turned up at all?
No doubt I'll get shot down in flames
