This hard drive was from an IBM Thinkpad. It was a Z7K500-500 500Gb drive (HTS725050A7E630)
The symptom presented were that the laptop would not boot. When trying it came up with a bad drive error. When put into a hard drive caddy, the drive would not show at all on a windows system.
We worked out that the drive had some major physical damage to the Master File Table which prevented it from being accessed in any system. We were able to repair the damage to the master file table, and while unable to repair the damage enough to retrieve the files in the damaged section, it was only around .9% of the MFT that was damaged, so most of the data could be recovered.
The client was happy and paid the minimum hardware recovery costs and received his data on a 2Tb external HDD that he can now use to back up in future.
