We received to projects yesterday from completely different locations in North America in which both clients were told by the technician that their data is encrypted.
Case 1 - Seagate BlackArmour NAS RAID 1 Mirror
Original Diagnosis (as we understand it) by computer shop offering data recovery services: one drive has bad heads and the other's data is encrypted and will require an encryption expert
Our Diagnosis: one drive has suffered a complete head crash and the other's file system was only inaccessible because of a minor software glitch caused by the one dead drive and the use of the reset button on the back of the case
We fully cloned the drive and recovered the data in less than 12 hours.
Case 2 - 320GB IDE Seagate from a generic USB enclosure
Original Diagnosis by Professional lab in the US: drive has electronic issues and is encrypted and charged the client $650 USD for the encrypted image of the drive for them to figure out themselves.
Our Diagnosis: drive has a blown chip on the PCB.
After transferring the ROM to a donor PCB, we were able to fully clone the drive with 1 read error, but no unread sectors after a second read of the one bad sector. All the data in all 4 partitions is fully accessible and absolutely not encrypted
I'm sure that we have probably had a few times over the years where we misdiagnosed a drive, it is bound to happen. With these cases, they were both very simple recovery projects and it really makes me wonder how many of their clients were also mislead to think that their data is not recoverable and didn't know to get a second opinion.