Repair Fail: CompUSA Installs Files on Wrong Hard Drive

Posted 04/15/2010 at 7:35am | by Paul Lilly

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Big name PC repair shops don't need any more bad publicity, but they're getting it anyway courtesy of a pretty embarrassing SNAFU by CompUSA. Here's what happened.

According to CBS News in Chicago, a woman named Kymberli Mulford entrusted the CompUSA in Hoffman Estates with removing a nasty virus on her system that she believed was causing it to shut down. Around the same time, Karen Davis took her PC in to th same store for repairs. CompUSA purportedly took care of both issues, but they also installed Mulford's files on Davis's PC. Oops!

"It was everything, pictures of her kids, notes, and emails," Davis said. "Even what meds her kids were taking, just very personal stuff."

Davis did the right thing by getting in touch with Mulford to tell her what happened, but now Mulford fears her data could have been loaded onto other machines too.

"All of that information is a gold mine for thieves," said Roger Safian, a computer security expert. "They back up all the data first, then they re-install it after they remove the virus, and that could be how they ended up making this mistake. They re-installed one person's data to the other person's machine."

According to CompUSA, the tech and his supervisor were fired because of the incident.

Have a PC repair horror story of your own? Tell us all about it in the comments section below!