“scratched”. Do they think we are really that stupid? Having opened up quite a few to repair them in my time I call BS.
Does ‘scratched’ mean it was physically manipulated with, say the tip of some scissors, OR does it mean it was defective and scratched (like in bowling when you go over the line and disqualified)? If the first it could only mean it was intentionally manipulated to create a defect, not that it had a defect. Obstruction of justice comes to mind.
“scratched” ,,, I have only heard that term associated with tape storage (and I was a datamanagement pro) ,, meaning that a tape dataset has been marked in the catalog (ie. the “TMC” or tape management catalog) as being available for re-use, it is a “scratch” volume ... obviously the data is still on the tape until it is reused and possibly after re-use if the data put on the volume is small... although you would need special utilities to read past the eof marker.