Don't have to apologize we both are just tryin to do our best.

If you have the tools to rebuild a ROM from the firmware MODs in the SA, then why would you need to outsource "firmware failures"? Surely there's a lot more money to be made from an actual data recovery than a PCB sale?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar - there are a lot of recovery companies already. We focus on retail aspect rather than services. Our services are there just to accompany out products. I hope that makes sense. We are doing quite well without performing any recoveries ourselves.

Do you give all your customers the same email template if the problem turns out not to be a simple PCB fault? What if the problem happens to be a stuck spindle, stiction fault, motor fault, preamp, or something else?

You say that you were able to rebuild the ROM from the SA. How were you able to do that if both the PCB and preamp were dead?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar, I like you a lot, because you help to improve our service!

It took me some time to look into this case and I do see some flaws in our service now. I did take a note of it and will fix it first thing Monday. The whole issue is due to templates, and the way we train our customer support. We train them to heavily rely on templates when we first send our results of our diagnostics. If we were to speak with a customer through phone or email, we would get into more details and explain things in a better way.

In this gentlemen's particular case, there was no adaptation done. Based on the engineer notes, he took a knowingly good PCB, wrote closest to SN ROM and attempted to calibrate any of the heads. None of the heads calibrated, including non-system ones, even with different ROMs. Therefore new PCB does not have the original ROM, but we identified the failure as preamp, and used our contract price from a nearby data recovery company to quote the client. Because of the template, it was misleading fact that ROM was in fact adapted and issue is with "heads". It is our fault.
Generally, we are able to transfer original ROM onto new PCB one way or another, so I have overlooked an issue where ROM simply cannot be transferred. It will be fixed immediately.

As far as templates, we have different ones for every failure, but they generally do not include info such as "PCB is defective and ROM was adapted". Most of the time, it is EITHER PCB is dead or there is something else wrong. It isn't common for us that there is an additional failure, so therefore templates aren't perfect. All of our templates are publicly available and I can share them via PM with anyone.

I apologize if the information about our company diagnostics was misleading. In no way we are trying to benefit from misleading our clients, and that is why I am so confident about our work and the way we diagnosed this client's hard drive. I shall work on our companies templates and fix all of the unclear information immediately.

If I had made a clerical blunder which cast serious doubts on my integrity, I would feel that there was only one way to make restitution, and that would be to offer my customer a free data recovery. But that's me.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

We will be in touch with the client to see what he wants to do.

Received my hard drive back yesterday.

@porthas, Thanks for the explanation regarding the e-mail templates and for personally looking into my case!
I understand that there are cases where just swapping the defective PCB isn't sufficient due to other defective components. I took my chances and I was unlucky (or actually my parents are). The good thing about this all is that they now really understand the importance of backing up their data, so I don't think this will happen to them again.

Frank