legality of copying data onto hard drive

I run a small computer repair shop and was helping my father in law, who lives out of state, over the phone. I determined his hard drive was starting to crash on his desktop which is running Vista and recommended that he take it to a shop where he lives. He took it to Best Buy where they replaced the hard drive and installed Windows on the new hard drive. They told him that they could copy his personal data off the old hard drive but it was illegal for them to copy it on to the new hard drive. So they sent him home with the old hard drive and some kind of data transfer cable.
In all the places that I worked at before I started my place we always copied personal data from an old drive onto a new one when hard drives were replaced. Is the tech at Best Buy correct and it's illegal to copy someone's data onto a new hard drive? If it is I know a lot of techs that have been breaking the law for years.

 

That's a new one on me - if true, then I'm included in the lawbreaking category. In fact, I'm subscribed in multiple threads here and in other forums where I am complicit in doing just that - copying data from drive to drive.

:confused

 

Sounds as if they just didn't want to take the time to do it.
Making excuses is all that is.

 

It may be a corporate policy to protect it from liability. I vaguely remember something about BB employees poking around in customers' personal info while fixing their PCs.

 

Or likely they meant programs wouldn't be allowed to be copied and was misunderstood.

 

As already stated probably a corp policy. I am sure best buy has been bitten by the "well you touched it last" phrase a few times. I even shy away from doing certain things because of this.

 

Maybe it's illegal for them (Halo's 'corporate policy' statement), but not in the broader sense of the word.

Touchy subject - IMO, just because something's 'illegal' doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.

 

I agree that it is probably corporate policy, but I am sure that somewhere in the "terms and conditions of service" there is probably a section that says something like "we are not liable for corrupted data", so surely the "we won't touch it" policy is not needed if they cannot be held liable.

 

I believe there were allegations a while back that BB employees were actually copying peoples personal info for their own amusement. The head honchos would want to avoid this sort of liability also.

 

Makes sense.

 

I NEVER recommend anyone to take their computer to BB (Geek Squad), friend of mine brought her laptop to them to get the case removed when she broke it (Computer was purchased at BB and it still worked) BB mixed up the tickets and removed her HDD and replaced it. She calls me asking why all of her stuff is gone. When I looked at her paper work, sure enough it stated replace case, NOT HDD. She is in Law School and all of her term papers and homework were on this HDD. In small print, their contract states that they can pretty much do what ever they want to your computer with no recorse. They would not even give her HDD back to her that they removed because they said it is now the property of BB. Said if she would pay $250 they would try to recover the HDD and get her data back on DVD.

That is why they sold your Dad a data cable. To get more $$$$

BB is garbage IMO