WD10EADS recognised as Seagate F3

[cheadledatarecovery]

This was one from about a year ago. Accessing data was not a problem but how the HDD entered this state I have no idea. Does anyone else?

Model of HDD:
WD10EADS-65L5B1

When attached to a computer the HDD was recognised as a 320GB Seagate HDD. Model ST9320325AS / 6VDC44HD

When the drive is mounted on PC3K, and "Auto Utility" is used it detects the HDD as F3 series Seagate. (See attached screenshot). It was necessary to alter the max LBA to allow access to all sectors.

As far as I am aware this HDD was handled previously by a PC Shop. I have no idea how it would be possible for the HDD to enter this state. I can't imagine another DR company would go altering such parameters.

Any thoughts?
John

Attachments

Western Digital WD10EADS reporting as a Seagate HDD

[w.simon]

Hello

Could you provide some pictures of the drive?

[cheadledatarecovery]

Please find attached a front an back of the HDD.

Attachments

[lcoughey]

My guess is that someone messed with it to so that they could try to trick a RAID or DVR.

[cheadledatarecovery]

What I am curious about is how they have altered the reported firmware revision. Altering a serial and model number is relatively straight forward, but to get the WD HDD to report a Seagate FW revision is unusual.

The data on the HDD did not give any clues as to why they may have wanted to alter such parameters. The disk had a single NTFS partition at using all 320GB of free space. Looks largely to be a backup HDD.

The whole matter was made even more confusing as the PC Shop managed to mix up the HDDs at their end. When I sent a file listing to their end user I got to find out that the data on the disk pictured above was not the required data. They had no idea where the customer's original disk went. Great stuff

[fzabkar]

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Hd ... lysis.html