Invalid disk geometry or the likes?

[trink]

So yeah, I have a hard drive that is 750 GB, and it's being read as a 2 TB.
Testdisk shows it having 267349 cylinders when it should only have 91201, and changing the geometry in testdisk is only session based.
I tried using

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=16k conv=notrunc

and I tried the same with dcfldd, to no avail.
I've tried writing an msdos partition table to it using fdisk, and many other things.
Any time I try to use mkfs in parted after creating a partition table, it tells me that there's an unrecognized disk label, so then I create one inside of the same parted session and try again, and it still says it's an unrecognized disk label.
So, as it stands, dd, dcfldd, testdisk, photorec, parted, gparted, and fdisk are all failing.
As far as I know there's no way to truly change the geometry of the disk, just change how the disk is read by feeding a program different geometry.
Any ideas as to what I might be able to do next?
I'm not looking to send it in anywhere, I'd prefer to do it myself.

Thanks

[fzabkar]

Is it an external drive? What is its model number?

[BlackST]

Buy a Pc3000 UDMA - about 10'000 bucks - then learn to use it. If it is a firmware problem - 20-30 percent- you'll be able to repair and get data. Otherwise it is one or more head failing, it will pinpoint the problem. If so, with 5'000 or so, you can buy the equipment to do mechanical intervention with donor... Also take into account some money for buying the info to do it. Simple.

[trink]

Buy a Pc3000 UDMA - about 10'000 bucks - then learn to use it. If it is a firmware problem - 20-30 percent- you'll be able to repair and get data. Otherwise it is one or more head failing, it will pinpoint the problem. If so, with 5'000 or so, you can buy the equipment to do mechanical intervention with donor... Also take into account some money for buying the info to do it. Simple.

Seeing how the drive isn't worth 10 grand in itself, I feel that it'd be a bit more...... cost efficient... to just chalk one up to data loss and buy another. Chances are that I won't be having a problem like this in the near future with multiple drives, so it wouldn't be a good investment for the future either. I'll save that money and buy a few six packs of beer for myself, maybe a couple bags of crisps.

Is it an external drive? What is its model number?

Well, here's the story.
It was originally a 750GB MyBook, I can't remember the exact model number of the entire external drive setup. I'd bought two of them, and at one point, unclean power (from a generator) tore both the enclosures up. I took the hard drives out of both of the enclosures and bought two new ones. One hard drive works fine, the other one, which is this one, is on the fritz. The drive itself is a Western Digital WD7500AAKS, WD Caviar SE16. That's from the drive itself.

[fzabkar]

I've seen many cases where WD external drives identify themselves with a bogus 2TB capacity. I suspect this is the way the USB-SATA bridge chip behaves when it is unable to detect the drive behind the bridge. You may find that the drive behaves differently when attached directly to a SATA port on your motherboard. It will still be faulty, though.

[BlackST]

NEVER seen a Mybook where the interface made it appear 2TB while the drive was working. It's normal behaviour of this drive series (false capacity and no access to data) when fucked up. Anyway, as there is no mechanical damage i.e. dropped drive (from what the OP said) , the recovery process should not be extremely expensive. Not equal the cost of beer and crisps anyway.

The quotes for the tooling was posted "just in case".