David L

I accidentally broke a Netflix movie DVD. Assuming that I want to take responsibility and pay for it, Netflix will charge me about $14. I can get a brand new copy of the same exact movie at retail for much less. What happens if I just transfer the white barcode sticker from the center of the Netflix copy to the retail copy and return that? I chatted with a Netflix customer service rep on the phone and she said that the disc will be run through a "machine" that will check the serial number of the disc to make sure it matches an actual inventory item, and reject it if they don't match, but I am skeptical. I think they probably just scan the little round barcode sticker at the center of the disc. But I'm asking for an answer from a person who actually KNOWS from having worked at one of the Netflix mailing depots.

If I can solve this with a $5 replacement leaving the company none the wiser (and giving them a brand new disc instead of the scratched and worn copy they sent me), that will be undoubtedly better than paying $14. I'm tempted to try it regardless. The discussion at http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2007/03/what_happens... was interesting, especially the post by delemi, a Netflix employee, but it didn't quite offer enough detail. Plus that discussion was several years old, the process may have changed since then.

Thanks for your assistance.

It was working fine at 320 gigs on a winXP system which died and I then installed it without changes as a slave on a winME system with a slightly older motherboard. Apparently the BIOS on the older board did not support drives larger than 128 gigs, because some directories were not accessible (showed as gibberish folder and file names that were un-openable) but a decent amount of the data was still available. I copied what I could to another drive just to be safe.

So far so good, because I figured to just drop the drive back into an XP system which I know supports large capacity disks, but when I did that the drive is now showing up as an unformatted 127 gig drive. Yikes! It looks like the winME system wrote a new partition table to the MBR on this disk.

Any ideas on how to fix this without data loss? To the best of my knowledge no changes were made to any directory structures or data files while it was on the older machine, so I really didn't think this would be a problem. I'm currently exploring what can be done with a commercial data recovery app called Zero Assumption Recovery which I've used successfully in the past but so far it thinks the drive is 127 gigs also.

It won't be the end of the world if I can't recover but it would be very annoying. Any help appreciated, thanks for looking.