Disk that comes from a competitor; has done everything to make recovery impossible

We recently received a drive that had been with a competitor.

Our client was not satisfied with the proposed price and decided to entrust the drive to us.

Immediately When the drive came to us we saw that something was wrong.

The ROM that was on the circuit board was not soldered properly, that was already a first point.

When we Once we had sorted that out, we were able to gain access to the Service Area of ​​the drive using some tricks. These are software modules that are on the platters and that are necessary for the disk to function properly.

The software version of the ROM did not match that of the modules on the platters and the version of the first copy on the platters did not match that of the second copy on the platters.

In short, either the ROM was not original, or (some of) the modules were not original.

Fortunately, we have the expertise in-house to deal with this.

Conclusion: The ROM was not original, and some of the modules had been replaced by modules from another drive. Fortunately, the essential modules were still original, otherwise recovery would have been impossible.

After replacing the modules with the wrong SW version with the correct SW version and replacing the ROM, we were finally able to gain access to the data.

Such practices are unfortunately not an isolated case and are unworthy of a professional Data Recovery company.