I have 2 fake external hard drives that claim to have a storage capacity of 2TB. I pulled the enclosure apart and the hard drives seems to be refurbished ones with their labels replaced as Barracuda LP 2000 GB labels (the serial numbers on both labels are the same).

Interestingly, one of the drives have 160G written on it with pencil. However, the counterfeiters seem to have done something to the firmware, because CrystalDiskInfo reports them as 2TB ST2000DL003 drives.

I then delete the 1.81 TB partition in Windows disk management and tried to create a new one and format it. Once I get to this point, the drives would make some noise that is common to dying drives.

I am not interested in using these drives for production, but I am interested in finding the true identity (manufacturer/serial number/model number, etc) and restoring it to their factory defaults with the right capacity.

Can this be done without any special equipment? This would be an interesting learning exercise.

Some pictures of the drives in question:

Here are the screens from CrystalDiskInfo:

Note the serial numbers are the same (these are 2 different drives!). How is this done? Did they have to tamper with the controller board? I would assume that changing the firmware doesn't change the serial number at all.