Question: I’ve got an old harddrive (Seagate, 200MB) here which just failed, and I wanted to get an image from it with dd. The hd is recognized as device (f.e. /dev/sdb) but dd does not copy anything from it. Additionally to it I can’t select it in parted (just does nothing, no error). I already tried to cat it (cat /dev/sdb), but that does also return nothing. This whole thing is at the moment behaving like /dev/null…someone an idea what I could try next?
Thanks in Advance
dd output:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/mnt/temp.dat0+0 records in0+0 records out0 bytes copied, 2.05 s, 0.0 MB/s
Edit: dmesg is showing at no point errors.
Edit2: Thanks to everyone for the great suggestions, tried them, but the harddisk is gone.
Answer: Sometimes dead drives will still show up as the devices, since the connectors are still fine and the board is still fine, but one of the other physical components is broken. You could try placing the platters in another disk or paying for professional recovery, but these are probably both overkill. What was on the drive if you don’t mind me asking?