hi folks.

got this drive back from a datarecovery firm i didn't proceed with as i couldn't afford the quotation.

i know its not a diy thing. i just want to know the fault. the report said it had head damage which they temporarily swapped over to get a file listing of the data.

the problem is that the noise i'm getting now is different from when i gave it to them.

when i gave it to them it was a slight clicking. now it is different. i've attached the sound recording.

a different datarec company refused to work on this drive as they suspect incompatible parts may have been put in after putting it on their pc3000 machine.

i have it back now.

it is a 1tb wd10eads-00L5B1

That sounds pretty nasty to me.

No idea who you've sent it to, but I have heard about unscrupulous DR companies who "butcher" drives that have had the quotes refused

They could well have put a known duff set of heads in there, out of spite.

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hi

geewizz. i sent it to a pretty big firm which i wont name just in case they are in these forums.

actually th other datarec company that refused to work on it opened it up in their cleanroom and they think the magnet does not match the heads mechanism and the other company had written some codes with pentelpen.

is that a fair enough assessment to refuse working on this drive?

have you heard of this fault before? sorry its not too clear as I was recording it using my laptop as i power it up using a usb external caddy.

See this kind of fault (WD with bad heads) pretty much every day, most are recoverable.

Mostly depends on whether or not the platter(s) are damaged and/or to what extent.

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Plenty of drives come sealed with markings on the magnets or heads (usually in chinese)

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

You mean something like this?



As drc says, we see these often in sealed drives.

To me, this drive is recoverable assuming that there is no media damage.

The sound is quite typical, we do these every day.
I don't know why other company refused to work. Maybe they saw obvious signs of cannibalism?

A little out of topic (?) but we refused a drive a couple of days ago, someone came in with two 7200.12, donor and patient. The sticker on patient was missing, and he claimed "he took everything from donor and put it to patient". When we asked what he meant, he said he swapped heads, pcb etc but (surprisingly...) drive did not work. Then he swapped platters. Oh well...

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