In as few questions as possible, how did I get a near perfect clone of this drive?

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Pros only get one shot!

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Before it fail

_________________
http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.Assistencia.Tecnica
ACELab partner

_________________
Sabo Computer Repairs & Data Recovery

- Drive depoped at factory, no data on the damaged platter.

- Drive was empty or zero filled, a clone of an identical 0-filled or new drive would be the same as the drive with no data to start with.

- There was an image/backup available of the drive made some moments prior from it failing.

- Drive was on RAID 1 array (mirror) or any other redundant RAID array and the other drives survived so RAID array could be rebuild.

- Drive was under some sort of cloud copy software that back up on the fly to the cloud.

- Damaged platter didn't contain any data. Drive could be new and have just a few files that were stored on the other platters.

- Drive died at the end of a DDI/PC-3000 DE cloning process.

- Time machine.

- Erwin Schrödinger Quantum theory - You place the hard drive inside a box and the observer determines (decided) if the drive is broken or not. If you keep the box closed then the drive is good and broken at the same time

_________________
1Q9xrDTzTddUXeJAFRn37aqh1Yr6buDCdw - (Bitcoin Donations)
paypal.me/Spildit - (PayPal Donations)
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

Is it WD?

Yes it is WD .

+1

- Drive contains less data and last used sector was before the first scratch from inside out.

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan

Yep, top platter surface unused. De-popped at factory!

One very lucky lady got all her family photos back!

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

yes lucky

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan

Damn...

WD refurbish a drive that shows this kind of scratches and put it back on business??

I wonder why they fail...

_________________
http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.Assistencia.Tecnica
ACELab partner

What?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Lucky client Sean,

I do not think that these damages left the factory, a later crash is the cause.
Your client made a superior choice in you, could imagine others would have rejected this case after lifting the lid.

Have seen it before that 1 or 2 heads are not used, if the failed qc or simply downgraded to lower capacity i can only guess.

_________________
Digitalsupport Data Recovery
https://digitalsupport.dk

I have seen one case at Tom's Hardware (?) where a 500GB (on the label) WD drive benchmarked like a 3-head 750GB drive that had been shortstroked.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

If the drive had left the factory in a crashed state with the affected surface disabled, then the whole platter would have been reduced to glass or shiny metal in very short time.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

The drive had been dropped.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

And only the top platter was damage?
No other problems?

If so, why did WD depoped that head? Some kind of problem was detected there....

_________________
http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.Assistencia.Tecnica
ACELab partner