Hi All,
I got "a fail to recover" drive from a competitor lab (the client gave us the drive and not the other lab - in other words: this is not an outsourced drive).
I opened the lid of the drive and saw the following:
1) Only 1 platter with clean surface.
2) Two weird plastic bolts in the gaps between the bolts which tied the motor ring to the platter -> see the attached picture.
The drive model is:
WD1600AAJS-00PSA0
I never saw such bolts before inside a drive. Does anyone know what those 2 plastic bolts which were found inside are??
Background:
The client told that the other lab diagnosed that the drive has corruption in the ROM along with bad heads.
He had been also told (after he agreed the imaginary quote) that in order the retrieve the data the labs technician performed 7 heads swaps.
Eventually after 7-10 days of reading slowly the drive the other lab gave the client many of the required files but none of them is a real file. All the files are useless I mean the right file name + the right file size BUT without any real content inside.
I diagnosed few of the files with hex editor and found out that every single file structured by the following content: "Read Error Damaged Sector Read Error Damaged Sector Read Error Damaged Sector...." (It is so in all the files. There are no any headers inside the files or even other garbage data)
Actually the lab gave the client 120GB of data but without any real content or a single working file.
I compared those files to files with bad sectors inside that I've recovered from other drives by using PC3000. By inspecting the files with hex editor it can be seen that in every place that a bad sector was occurred than a set of zeros were found instead inside the file. It gives me the conclusion that the other lab didn't use PC3000 for recovering the drive.
Does anyone have any guess what tool can give such results and create such files?
But the most weird is what those 2 plastic bolts are?!
PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED PICTURE

Best Regards,
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