Dead Maxtor OEM harddrive, who will support me?

So I bought a pair of maxtor hard drives, pulls from a compaq machine, about a year ago through the forums, now one of them is pinging the platters. Bios Doesn't recognize it. My diagnosis is premature death.

Now comes the real problem. Compaq, the company that sold them to the market, won't support the drives cause they currently aren't in a compaq pc. And Maxtor's website says that I should contact the OEM user of these drives for Warranty support (i.e. No help from maxtor.) Who do I turn to? Who can I trust?

Unfortunately I think you are out of luck. Check the deals section here and/or your local computer store (or CompUSA) for special/rebates and get yourself a new drive. Sorry I don't have any better suggestions.

That's kind of the point of OEM drives. You save money by not getting a warranty.

Have you tried entering the serial number at www.maxtor.com to check the warranty status? The only time Maxtor doesn't support OEM drives is when they were originally sold to a big computer maker, like Compaq or Dell, but otherwise you get the exact same coverage provided with retail boxed drives. As far as I know, all HD manufacturers are like this, except maybe Hitachi, if they're carrying on IBM's warranty policies.

If you paid by credit card,

Warranty status : Please report to OEM for warranty support.