br3tt wrote:the other company had written some codes with pentelpen.
You mean something like this?
As drc says, we see these often in sealed drives.
To me, this drive is recoverable assuming that there is no media damage.
The sound is quite typical, we do these every day.
I don't know why other company refused to work. Maybe they saw obvious signs of cannibalism?

A little out of topic (?) but we refused a drive a couple of days ago, someone came in with two 7200.12, donor and patient. The sticker on patient was missing, and he claimed "he took everything from donor and put it to patient". When we asked what he meant, he said he swapped heads, pcb etc but (surprisingly...) drive did not work. Then he swapped platters. Oh well...