So the founder of the IPDRA, an association dedicated to maintaining a high standard in excellence, and technical ability in the data recovery industry was not able to help......

Disklabs are the pits in my honest opinion.

When I had the problem with the failed disk I sent it to them in the post for next day and put a note in the package to ask them to contact me so that I knew the disk arrived safely, they never contacted me, so I have to call them.

About 5 days later I called Disklabs for a status update on the disk, I was told that because I had put the disk on a there "cheap service" (and these are the exact words of the sales guy, Paul I think) that I would not get any feedback until around 7 days.

So on 7 days I called again I was then told that it was a more than likely a PCB fault and they could not source the part and they had contacted all their suppliers to source the part, so after 10 days I drove to Tamworth to collect the disk in person to be told that I not recover with the data as it was a Western Digital drive, something about heads, pcb's......blah blah blah

I Goggled the PCB number and was able to purchase a PCB straight away which I thought was strange. So then I got on this forum and thankfully you kind people recommended Retrodata. Duncan was great, told me that since the drive could been seen in the BIOS he did not believe it was a PCB issue and that he could help me.

The disk was posted to Duncan he sent a email to say he was working on the Disk and within 24 hours he called me to say he had the data I required, sent and invoice which we paid immediately via BACS and Duncan sent a link to retrieve the data.

So the moral of the story for me is never use Disklabs, got the opinion they are only interested in big players like the Police, Rolls Royce after seeing their visitors book and not the mere mortal that runs a small business.

ROFL

Bless his cotton socks!

This is a HP rebranded disk, and ID in Bios (GB0160EAPRR) is different to the ID on label (WD1602ABKS). I guess this is where the confusion set in, but I am surprised that a company that rate themselves so highly failed to even reach the right diagnostic.

Personally I think you are lucky, if the parts were sourced under inaccurate diagnostic (something about heads, pcb's......blah blah blah) then your data may have been lost forever.

Also, since you were able to source the part so quickly, maybe you should ask them if they have any jobs going


p.s. Good job @ retrodata.