ROM Rebuilding Needed

[kangarootaco]

The only thing that makes me a little suspicious about Ontrack is that Daniel from Recovery Squad had the drives dropped off at their Melbourne CBD collection point early Wednesday morning and it should have reached their lab by Thursday afternoon. Instead, they said it didn't arrive until Friday afternoon. What was happening to the drives during that extra day? Does Ontrack have an initial inspection done at the collection point? I guess I can ask them.

[SirForensic]

The only thing that makes me a little suspicious about Ontrack is that Daniel from Recovery Squad had the drives dropped off at their Melbourne CBD collection point early Wednesday morning and it should have reached their lab by Thursday afternoon. Instead, they said it didn't arrive until Friday afternoon. What was happening to the drives during that extra day? Does Ontrack have an initial inspection done at the collection point? I guess I can ask them.

To my knowledge, OT is not doing any initial inspections in Melbourne. They only receive the device and send it to Brisbane.

I was reading this post and the report you received from Squad doesn't look right to me. Also, the attached photos showed at least one of the drives was handled wrong causing platter pollution and/or damage, very unprofessional work.

Sometimes if one of the platters is damaged, there's still a chance to get data from healthy platters.

[kangarootaco]

Another email from Ontrack:

We do have a camera in our shipping are to capture the state of devices when they are received and dispatched, however as these drives were closed when we received them we don’t have any footage of the state of the platters. We do not use cameras to record our work inside the Cleanroom environment. What I can provide is an excerpt from the engineers notes in our business system where he noted the damage he saw. Please note that this is not a full extract, and some notes containing proprietary information have been removed:

ST3000DM007-1WY10G
Drive has been previously worked on by Recovery Squad.
Drive provided with 3 donors.
Opened drive, significant contamination to top surface.
Read ROM from PCB.
ROM is mostly erased.
Read all Donor ROM's, was able to locate good ROM with correct SN, is already patched.
Removed heads and platters.
Surface 1 is covered in record crashes.
Surface 0 has sharp crash in SA
Both SA surfaces lost.
Drive is unrecoverable.

The three highlighted notes recording the damage correspond to the three pictures we provided earlier. Please note that we have left the contaminated platter as we found it, as the other damage was sufficient enough to conclude the drive was unrecoverable.

I can say with certainty that the platters were damaged when we received the drive. I would also note that there were several screws missing from the drives when we received them, including an internal head assembly retaining screw on one of the drives. Parts were also mismatched, for example the covers were mixed and attached to incorrect chassis etc. This information might be useful in helping assess the quality of the work from [Recovery Squad]. We have replaced these missing screws when we reassembled the drives ready to ship back.

Please let me know if you need any more information, and please confirm the address you would like these devices shipped to when you have a moment.