Decided to take advantage of the exchange rate at the weekend and bought a watch off eBay - a Seiko Kinetic Titanium.

I'm sitting here now wondering if its gonna be ok if it gets a huge dose of X-Rays at some point from US to UK either through customs or anywhere else.

I only ask as the HP Digital Entertainment Centre I received last month required a reimage of the software after I got it as it was totally wiped - I can only imagine the disk was corrupted by x-raying as the seller assured me it was perfect (and loaded with music) when it left him. (yes, yes I know he should have deleted it, but I didn't know when I bought it

So um.... my watch gonna be ok?

Millions of watches go through airport secuity every year, and have been for many many years. I think that if there were a problem with watches and x-ray machines, we'd all know about it by now.

And regarding your HP device, I don't think PC hard disks are vulnerable to that either. Although I'm less sure of that. There are probably a dozen other possible reasons that the hard disk lost its data unrelated to X-rays.

I would be more worried about magnetic fields then x-rays

Other then causing them to GLOW in the dark I see no reason that x-rays would effect the watch or the handheld, a strong magnatic field maybe but it would need to be pretty strong,,, I spent a good soild 90 mins mounting a pair of sub in the back of my car wearing my watch cell phone and Ipaq with no issues and those speakers warped my tv screen from 10 foot away. (odd colors in the corners you know what I am talking about it goes away when you move the magnets)

I've had electronic equipment xrayed before and I've never had a problem. If the HD was really erased by the machines then you'd end up with a useless drive as all of the positioning info would also be lost. You can't write this yourself and is done at the factory using special equipment.

Really? I can't think why else the drive needed re-imaged. X-Rays were the only thing I could think of.

Hard disk servo information is essential for the drive to operate. Without it the drive will be useless and probably won't even start up properly as the drive electronics would have a fit from the missing data.

It's more likely that the guy erased it or swapped the drive out. If it works and you've got the right amount of disk space then just ignore it

You would need an extremely powerful magnetic field to erase a 3.5" HD. The high data density on the platters mean you need a powerful field to rewrite the bits. X-ray machines could fog certain types of photographic film but that's about it.

Hmmm... yeah my unit works so I'm not too fussed about the music as I've filled it with my stuff now.

So looks like my watch will be ok - panic over

When I was working at a hospital, I had a watch destroyed by an MRI machine. One of my patients freaked out and dropped the bulb used for "escape" so I ran in the room and yanked him out. Wiped my watch, my ID badge, and all my credit cards. Wicked powerful magnets.