Hi All,

I got "a fail to recover" drive from a competitor lab (the client gave us the drive and not the other lab - in other words: this is not an outsourced drive).
I opened the lid of the drive and saw the following:
1) Only 1 platter with clean surface.
2) Two weird plastic bolts in the gaps between the bolts which tied the motor ring to the platter -> see the attached picture.
The drive model is:
WD1600AAJS-00PSA0
I never saw such bolts before inside a drive. Does anyone know what those 2 plastic bolts which were found inside are??

Background:
The client told that the other lab diagnosed that the drive has corruption in the ROM along with bad heads.
He had been also told (after he agreed the imaginary quote) that in order the retrieve the data the labs technician performed 7 heads swaps.
Eventually after 7-10 days of reading slowly the drive the other lab gave the client many of the required files but none of them is a real file. All the files are useless I mean the right file name + the right file size BUT without any real content inside.
I diagnosed few of the files with hex editor and found out that every single file structured by the following content: "Read Error Damaged Sector Read Error Damaged Sector Read Error Damaged Sector...." (It is so in all the files. There are no any headers inside the files or even other garbage data)
Actually the lab gave the client 120GB of data but without any real content or a single working file.
I compared those files to files with bad sectors inside that I've recovered from other drives by using PC3000. By inspecting the files with hex editor it can be seen that in every place that a bad sector was occurred than a set of zeros were found instead inside the file. It gives me the conclusion that the other lab didn't use PC3000 for recovering the drive.
Does anyone have any guess what tool can give such results and create such files?
But the most weird is what those 2 plastic bolts are?!

PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED PICTURE

Best Regards,

you will notice that they are not actually in the bolt holes..... they are there to perfect any imbalance in the platter rotation. Like balancing a wheel..... different colours are different densities (weights) and are placed around the centre hub to iron out any excessive vibration.

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East Anglian Data Recovery Services
http://www.eadr.co.uk

"If it's your only copy - then it's not a backup!"

@Touchclarity perfect explanation

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

COOOL
Where can I buy some of those??
What its professional name?

You will find them very often in F4 samsung, when you use a donor for heads you can take the little rubbers,
but what for did you build a balancer for hard drive platter

Are you sure about that?!
I never ever saw somthing about that and I opened at least few hundreds of drives already..

I did not build it. It come like that from other recovery lab.
Do you think that they put it on purpose before thay faild or even worse -> after they faild?!
Those plastic bolts are not seems femiliar from samsung heads or any other drive part no matter what vendor it is.
Any guess where do they arrived?

They are pretty common if you open up enough drives.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Agree

Dobre

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Murphy was an optimist

Datarecovery in Belgium, Holland, France and Germany
Datarecoverytools http://www.drtools.eu