My HDD died and I took it to professional recovery service. It seems that the problem was with hardware and they needed donor drive.
I provided one donor drive to them for recovery works. Today I've got a status update that they "used up" the donor drive and another donor drive is required.

Is it normal that more than one donor drive would be required for HDD recovery?

If it was their fault that somehow they managed to kill donor drive, I don't want to pay fortune to them to find another donor drive or spend my time looking for yet another drive with same model number.

There are often situation where multiple donors are needed. In cases of media damage donor heads can become contaminated with residue of scratched media, other times service head operations cannot be performed while remaining heads are good meaning a second part can be used to load adaptive information to RAM prior to hot-swap.

Often a badly deteriorated HDD can require multiple parts and multiple physical repairs for no apparent reason, simply the HDD is very very poor.

Other complications such as compatibility and even issues with the specific repair process can arise.

What was the diagnosis you got from the recovery firm?

I second that hddguy say's, It's not uncommon with both 2 or 3 donordrives
But usually it's not on the clients desk to find donars, as they don't know excactly what to search for.

A Good communication between client and the DR firm is what it needs, and should not end in those discussions / doubts.

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

Assuming this thread is real ...

1) Yes, depending on damage and what happened to the drive even more than 3-4 donor/parts can be necessary, but only if EVERY DATA IS NEEDED AT EVERY COST or every attempt should be performed to get the maximum amount of data

2) The OP sent HIS donor to the recovery firm because they were unable to locate a donor , timing was a problem, the drive IS actually "rare", it was sent in order to save $$$ or what else ?

3) Agree with Mr. Spokk : probably there was a communication issue or other ... uh... "problems" right from the start (I can guess tight budget first but it's only guessing based on what I have seen during all these years).

I find that when clients supply the "parts drive" they really don't catch on to the fact that their parts drive will be unstable for re-use, at best. They think that we can use it for parts and return it with the recovered data. So, we generally try to avoid using client supplied drives, just to avoid the confusion and just use them for destination drives. Most of the time, their parts drives aren't even close to be suitable donors.

What really bothers me is when we do use a client's drive for parts...especially on a dropped drive...the clients then go and submit for an RMA for both the original drive that they damaged by the drop and the parts drive that was damaged during the recovery process.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Absolutely yes, in cases of media damage then sometimes many donors are sacrificed.

Working on a WD3200BEVT now, that has chomped 3 sets of heads already. Had visible dings and scratches on platters. About 50% done so far.

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

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Firm said that heads block was corrupted and wasn't reading properly. As I understood from their explanation (but I'll try to get more details) the platters are not damaged.

The hard drive that failed is WD10EADS-11M2B2 and I found that a lot of people are having trouble with it.
There are no hard drives in stock in my country, so it's cheaper for me to buy one online and provide it to the firm because they are charging quite a lot.

This all makes a lot of sense, but I do have to wonder, what kind of "professional data recovery" shop asks a client for a donor drive?

That's a bit like a subcontractor building an addition on to your house asking you to go buy some tools and wood.

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Nationwide data recovery services for RAID servers and laptops - http://www.harddriverecovery.org/

Sometimes customers are such a PITA that they want it for YESTERDAY and are on a tight budget. What else to do ? Had one case where the drive was almost impossible to find (very rare) and conditions were too tight (budget, time) - instead of refusing, asked the customer to activate himself. Needless to say that after few days HE spent on googling, inquiring, ebay surfing and so on, "suddenly" the conditions were relaxed. It took weeks to find the exact donor with exact map and the price was not exactly low, including shipping.

Each case is different and also , in this very case, we don't know anything . It's a dead end / pointless discussion and a thread that could be closed, in my opinion.

Good point. I forgot about the PITA factor.

We just typically walk away from guys like that.

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Nationwide data recovery services for RAID servers and laptops - http://www.harddriverecovery.org/