Fun and strange cases

In the sea of boring head-swap cases in data recovery, engineer often craves for some unique and fun case.

Our engineers were lucky to get one such as that recently.

Unfortunatelly the whole story is covered with fraud from unnamed vendor.

We received an older 80gb 2.5“ Seagate disk .

At first glance it had usual problem called pending bug.

But usual methods of solving this bug did not yield any result.

These disks offer us a chance to avoid any problem with firmware by cloning them via terminal, but unfortunatelly it would literally need months to finish.

So our engineers started to dig deeper and deeper into the problem.

At one moment we got the disk in ready state and we were able to read it’s passport.

Shock and horror – it said ST1000LM024 with corresponding capacity of 1TB, correct firmware version and serial number.

Naturally, we began to trace our own steps, could it be that we wrote something to the disk to make it a 1TB drive...

But we wrote nothing of the sort... Again, we were shocked to find that actual data was written beyond factory maximum LBA. It turned out that someone actually changed drive ID and managed to find a way to use spare sectors to increase the total number of available sectors on the disk.

It is possible that after disk naturally started to develop bad sectors it did not have any spares to replace them and entered a loop trying to reallocate.

We managed to get all the data including those written beyond max lba, but the client was not happy when he heard how he was tricked.