Donor Drives is a professional hard drive and PCB supplier. We sell our products for hard drive repair and data recovery purposes.

Our services include:

• Worldwide shipping, including FedEx Priority Overnight (2-3 days on average anywhere!)
• Overnight shipping to United States and Canada
• 5-15% Base Discount for Partners!
• We can use your UPS or FedEx account for shipping.
• 30-days return policy
• Ever-Growing Inventory. We add new products DAILY!
• Priority Part Search Service
• We can manually look at any part in our inventory right when you call!

If you have any questions, or would like to make a purchase or search please call us at 1-800-733-0978. Visit our website - http://www.donordrives.com to see the full list of our products.

out of the subject porthas,

are you using Magento CMS?
if so, you need to be aware of updating it my friend, i used it before and got problems with it
do not forget to update whenever it released.

good luck

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Yeah we have a development team who is making sure everything is working properly. It did require quite some work, major customization and so forth, but overall we got used to it. Thanks for the tips.

One thing I wanted to add, as we still get questions about it. We CAN check for SPT, MicroJogs, Seagate PCB Revision, and anything else really that you need to know in order to find a good HDD match. We have PC3000 and can check for ANYTHING you need, no problem.
PS. We increased the discount % from 5% to 25%. Email or call for more details.

If an end user sends you a PCB with firmware embedded in the MCU, will you transfer the firmware to a replacement PCB (assuming it is possible), and if so, at what cost?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

We do have that service and we charge $75 to $95, depending on the type of drive and problem. Our price for those services is quite high, but making it any lower will be damaging for data recovery business.
If there is more advanced firmware or mechanical failure, we refer to data recovery companies.

OK, I'll keep that in mind.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

fzabkar,
Thank you. I saw a few references you made out there, that is highly appreciated. To anyone else following up with this thread:
Yes, often getting a PCB and swapping it out is pointless, there is a little more to it - as we explain in every PCB listing on our site. If you want to speak about your issue with us directly - call: 1-800-733-0978 and we will get your questions answered, about our services and products and how we can help you.

To be honest, I prefer two other suppliers, and the reason is that they are more transparent, and they offer a more complete service.

Specifically, whereas your web site uses the following wording to obscure the actual component that is responsible for the uniqueness of certain PCBs, those other suppliers not only tell the purchaser that a firmware or "ROM" transfer is required, but they also provide such a service for US$10.

"Please note: In many cases, a simple PCB swap will not fix the hard drive. Most circuit boards are unique to their hard drives! There are extra steps that have to be taken to insure that a foreign PCB is able to adapt with another hard drive. Some of the steps are impossible to complete without experience and professional equipment."

Why don't you just come clean and tell your customers that a particular WD board won't work unless they transfer the chip at U12? Why all the obfuscation? Are you in the data recovery business, or are you in the business of selling PCBs and HDDs?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The way you are looking at it is from a professional perspective. I strongly feel that "come clean" is an applicable term to speak about us. The reason why we have a toll free number, is so that clients can call in, and based on their model number of a hard drive we can tell them exactly where they stand, and whether or not they actually need a U12 swap, or PCB ROM recovery, or NV-RAM chip swap, etc., and how to proceed about that. We ENCOURAGE people to go to a local PC shop where they will do chip swap for $10. As far as doing the $100 for ROM recovery and such, doing it for $10 doesn't even make sense, compared to the cost of involved equipment. Those prices for services we have on our website were calculated and adjusted multiple times, besides, we are kind of forced to keep it this way by the industry. A large % of our clients are data recovery companies, that is something to keep in mind. Charging $10 will create a lot of enemies from friends. Our ultimate goal is to provide our customers with a solution for every part needed, and not to become a service provider. None of our customers ever had a problem with paying $100 for ROM recovery, they even feel it is very fair compared with what data recovery companies would charge.
Lastly, as far as your preference of other 2 competitors over us (I truly do not even know who you are talking about, as we have over 20 competitors in US alone, and 30 on eBay), that is your choice. Only thing I can do on behalf of Donor Drives, is to explain to you our perspective and show support of the idea of transparency. That is EXACTLY what we trying to do in our company, and if you feel differently about our company - it means that we are not doing our job correctly or as effectively as we should, and I appreciate you noting that. We will review everything and see how we can change to the better.

I cannot speak for Frank, but for the majority of us, we are in business to make a profit. It may seem like a simple task to move a U12 chip for $10. For an individual doing that type of work in their basement, $10 or $20 an hour probably isn't too bad money. Before you say that it only takes 15 minutes to swap the chip, don't forget the time to talk to the client, receive the original, test the original board, find a matching donor board, swap the chip, test the transfer, invoice the client, receive payment from the client, package the new board and ship it back to the client.

For businesses, there is a cost for an employee's time, more than their hourly salary. If you calculate the following into the U12 ROM chip swap, I cannot see how you could afford to offer the service for $10.

1. Employee's salary (assume about $50/hour when benefits, taxes and everything else are considered)
2. Facility costs (rent, utilities, internet, security, etc)
3. Marketing costs
4. Equipment purchase and maintenance costs
5. Inventory costs
6. Training costs
7. R & D costs
8. Shipping costs
9. And last, but not least, profits

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

We have added and revised a few things, which might interest many of you.
On every PCB listing of ours, we now clearly explain the circumstances of PCB swap and offer few resources to help clients better understand this procedure.
The resources include our new PCB Swap Guide, and Donor Matching Article. Lastly, our clients now get PCB services completely FREE. That includes chip swap and ROM recovery service, both are completely free. As always, for our returning clients and partners we provide great discounts on hard drive donors.

We recently noticed an increased volume of calls, when a clients would request us to provide heads map or MicroJogs. All of this can be done within couple of minutes over the phone with us, and is not difficult at all to do, so everybody is welcome to call or email us with these type of questions.

PS. We would really appreciate some comments or corrections on our pcb swap guide or donor matching article. We want to make sure that the information we provide is as accurate as possible. For any exceptional comments, we would love to reference some backlinks.

Thank you very much.

Yours is the most complete and detailed guide that I have seen to date. And your services are also the most comprehensive of any PCB supplier.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Your form is too much.

@Good Stones,
I don't really get your comment.

@fzabkar,
Thank you for your support!

We still offer free adaptation service, and have a great number of drives / PCBs coming daily for the service. If you think that because the service is free you won't get quality customer service - you couldn't be more wrong. We offer email, chat, and phone support throughout the day. I will try and send a few customers to this topic and have them share their experience about service received from our company.

10 $.....

Not to mention any of the above companies but we know the cases where from 10 usd the bill grow suddenly to 900 usd.
Recently we had customers hard drive with new pcb after `firmware adaptation`. PCB had rom with header only. Lucky that it was WD drive so no problems to use rom from same model or rebuild from service area.
Investigation not possible.

I can guarantee it wasn't from us. We test logical access and bad sectors before shipping out the drive. Also, not $10, but free of charge.

I had purchased HDD recently from Donor Drives. My purpose was to backup NVRAM from the donor. I use Salvation tools. I was not able to read the complete modules and the donor was of no use to me I paid $155. I had sent mail regrds to this issue to Donor Drives but did not get any response. I wish I get at least a copy of the Firmware and my customer can get his data.

To be fair to "Donor Drives" they cannot be expected to guarantee that every single drives fw module is readable on every single drive, often brand new fully functional drives have a few unreadable mods but they work fine. If the drive is functioning (I.e. full LBA access, which I assume they test for) then the CRITICAL fw modules and NVRAM are OK.

Also they only offer PCB adaptation for free, not full data recovery support, but in fairness they should have at least acknowledged your email and replied to say this. Given them some time to reply, they are probably busy!

Either you have a non-NVRAM related issue or the SD tool isn't performing correctly, or there is a problem with your procedure. I suggest you contact SD support, after all that's what you have paid your money for!!

I have relationship/affiliation with DD or SD.

I have only commented on the basis of the information presented in your post, and have no knowledge of this particular case.

Good luck.

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

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