Dick Smith Electronics, a major Australian retailer have been accused of selling used and malware infected hard drives as new, endangering the computers owned by consumers. In one instance a preacher bought an external hard drive and when he plugged it in he was greeted by a pornographic video. You would think they would be hit with massive fines over this, so if you return an external hard drive to Dick Smith electronics, make sure to run cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda1 or what ever the device file for your drive is and zero out the drive. Then fill it with random data from /dev/urandom, cat /dev/random > /dev/sda1 would do the trick. Or in Windows you could format the drive and fill it back up with data and then format it again, that would do a good job of clearing it out. This and reports of them selling used RAM modules as new.
It is better to go to Harris Technology to purchase technology. They sell online and they are very reliable when you buy from them. Or JB HIFI, they are a very friendly retailer with a nice range of parts and computers to choose from. And more knowledgeable staff. And they actually sell all new computer parts and not second-hand parts marked as new. A video file can apparently contain malware as it can ask for a certain codec to be installed to play the video and this codec could contain malware that will be unknowingly installed on the unfortunate users computer. That is why this whole debacle is so shocking, the people responsible for this decision should be tarred and feathered.