I post this here 'cause it is not really DR related...

I have a customer that I repaired his drive and he doesn't want to pay for my services.

I am partly to blame but I still think I should be compensated.

I advertised Free Diagnostics. When the customer brought in his PC I took it in and told him I would look at it and report to him.

Well, it had the Seagate 7200.11 problem and I fixed it before I contacted him. Now he doesn't want to pay.

What I want to know is, how would I restore his "always busy" drive to always busy???

--- Flame on!!!

reload original FW modules to the drive. Maybe you will be lucky

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

I didn't change out the firmware. I just reset the drive. It'll go busy on its own sooner or later, but I would rather give it back to him the way he gave it to me...

This is one of the reasons why we are considering ditching free diagnosis.

Fed up with time-wasting skinflints who have no intention of paying for recovery. Either that or keep sending the drive "round the houses" until they find the cheapest quote, wasting everybodys time.

Trouble is there will always be somebody who will offer free diagnosis

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

You are right on the island they want to rip you off with a free diagnostics of the HDD and now I do not do this any longer. Before it was fine but now considering some idiots on the island think they can use some free software and other free tools have trashed too many drives there now. I do not want to waste my time any longer after this one has happened. I do agree that free should have some sort of a price tag on it. I did find out from one client who sent his drive to France he had to pay 300 euro for a diagnostic on his HDD if he wanted it done and did not go on with repairs. Now that one is a bit much but a 50 euro diagnostic would or should be fine so you know you are not wasting your time and if they go on with repair the charges are waved or taken into the repair cost.

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Iorana Haraharaini

I cannot restore to BSY problem, but I can easily revert back to 0LBA problem.

But we are all aware that sometimes there can be other complications beyond the obvious, so for me making the initial repairs is essential in identifying the extent of all that is wrong. Otherwise I could be quoting a client for a FW fix only then realize surface is filled with bad / unreadable sectors and 2 heads are failing.

Ideally some form of commitment without an evaluation fee is needed.

@WSDigital I will send to you PM

WSDigital states that "the customer brought in his PC" for free diagnostics. Does this mean that the customer just wanted his PC repaired, or did he specifically ask for a data recovery quotation? Perhaps the customer wasn't even aware that his HDD was faulty (the PC would have hung during the POST), in which case it would be unfair to suggest that he may be miserly. Instead, it could very well be that he had a complete backup of his data, or perhaps his data were of no value.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.