ST9500420AS detected but unable to read

[SilverR]

Hello,

I am having some trouble with a Seagate ST9500420AS 500GB hard drive.

It was located in my Lenovo W500 removable hard drive bay. I removed it and after attaching it again it was no longer recognized by Windows 10. Under disk management it showed up as an uninitialized disk. I was able to see the SMART information and it showed some bad sectors.

I can hear the HDD spinning and there are no foreign noises.

What I have tried so far:
1) Use TestDisk to recover lost partitions. This didn't work. I got "Read error at **/241/1 (lba=15183)"

2) Use Ddrescue to make an image from the HDD. This did also not work. It is only getting read errors and 0B of data is recovered (I let it run for a couple of hours).

So my question is- am I right in assuming this is a physical issue (the read heads are not working)?

Any suggestions on what to try or what the problem might be?

Best regards,
SilverR

[pclab]

Could be a bad head or just bad sectors.
Try to image the drive with Hddsuperclone and check the result.

But if data is really important, take it to a lab. Since the drive is still working, it could be a simple job and not very expensive.
The more you play with it, the harder it can get later (and expensive)...