I've tried using gddrescue to make an image of a bad hard disk, and the image file contains nothing but zero's.

If I zip the image file, it shrinks to almost nothing. 700Mb chunk of image file zips down to 100Kb!

Very odd.

Could it be a firmware problem or PCB problem?

The hard drive is a Seagate 7200.10 500gb ST3500830A, and was originally in a USB enclosure.

Does anyone know if there is a way I can recover the data from it?

I have a USB-TTL adaptor, but not really sure where to go from here.

Thanks

it is possible that the 00 00 00 is actually what is on the disk.

I'm 99% sure it's not all 00 00 on the disk... It also reads pretty slowly also, around 1.7mb per sec, which makes me think it could be a firmware issue? However I'm guessing here.

Here's the SMART data, for what it's worth:



The disk was actually owned by a friend of mine and he says that it did have a lot of photo's on the drive before it stopped working in the enclosure.

The enclosure now no longer spins the drive up, however using another power supply seems to make the drive spin up ok.

Would it be worth trying to connect the drive using a USB to TTL adaptor?

Thanks

Hi HT
700Mb chunk?

what command did you issue, and how long have you let it run ?

connections: always try to use native cables rather than, native to usb.


K

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