The sandcrawler was another exciting blank canvas for us to fill. This would take unusual measures. To get the droids' locations in this "droid prison" would require the original set blueprints.

Locating all the droids therein, however, would take unconventional research. The one thing that would have that information was the Lost Cut, the earliest film version of Star Wars. The Lost Cut shows the interior of the sandcrawler in much more detail than we see in the final cut of the film. A look at this footage, with the help of then Lucasfilm film archivist Tim Fox, made the location of every droid crystal clear, including droids we don't see in the final cut of the film. Thanks to the unique views in the Lost Cut, I was able to provide an accurate sketch for Richard with the location of every droid.

In short, Luke is out working, sees ships in the sky, runs off to tell his friends and in the process leaves his faulty, broken down, and smoking treadwell droid behind. Interestingly enough, during the droid sale later in the film, a treadwell droid is seen among the group.
Now, one might practically theorize that the production team only had so many cool droids that moved so they just reused the droid in this scene, writing it off as another droid of the same model, much like the other astromech droids or protocol droids you see in the films. I had always thought this to be the case.

Is there more to it than that, though? Was this droid, in fact, supposed to be the same one that Luke left out on the sand flats? If so, that brings up the humorous and ironic notion that the Jawas stole or scavaged the abandoned treadwell droid, fixed it up a little, and tried to resell it back to the original owners.

There's also this bit from the novel which takes place after Luke leaves the treadwell droid behind:

Behind him, a pitiful beacon of black smoke from the burning robot
continued to rise into the clear desert air. It wouldn't be there when Luke returned. There were scavengers of metal as well as flesh in the wide wastes of Tatooine.

It makes you think, doesn't it? Special thanks to Treadwell Jay and SKot for both pointing this out and then giving me their input.

On a side note, there appears to be a small scene that was deleted from the film (or the script) involving Jawas in their little homes, I assume. Here's a quote from George Lucas' famous May 1977 interview with Rolling Stone:

Well, the Jawas are more like scavengers, junk dealers. We had a Jawa village scene in the film but we didn't shoot it because the location was too far away, we just cut that out to keep on budget. We found these great things in Tunisia, little grain houses that were four stories high but with little tiny doors, little tiny windows, it was a hobbit village. So we had a whole sequence with these little hobbit-world slum dwellers but we had to cut it out.

It sounds like they came across this place and improvised some shots but the quote is a little vague. He could be talking about the same setting used in Episode I many years later for the slave hovels. Maybe this footage will show up one day. 

The promo still you see below is nothing that exciting, really. It's an alternate angle of some jawas and their latest items up for sale at the Lars homesetead. Watch out for that red R5 unit. I hear it's faulty.

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