Corrupted Hard Drive (Uninitialized, unable to format)

[HunterAP]

A while back, my friend's laptop HDD got busted when another friend accidentally dropped the laptop. He replaced the HDD and reinstalled all of his stuff, but I'm trying to access the files on the old drive, or at least format the drive.

I've tried connecting the HDD through two different SATA to USB adapters: the first one claims the USB drivers are corrupted with the "Set Address Failed" error, while the latter registers that the drive exists, but I can't seem to recover or format it. I've tried using programs like Testdisk, EaseUS Partition Master, Minitool Partition Wizard, and Windows Disk Management. All the programs say the drive is uninitialized and unallocated, and nothing I do manages to work. Here's what I tried so far:

1. Partition Recovery through Minitool Partition Wizard.
2. File Recovery trough Testdisk (trying all partition types).
3. Formatting through EasUS Partition Master.
4. Currently running HDDGuru's Loew-Level Format tool, but it spits out the same error "Media is write-protected" for the entire drive (so far).

Is there anything I can do to get it working? My friend only wants it as external storage, but if it's a lost cause then he'll just get an external hard drive.

[Adam Falt]

Turn it in to a profesinal so that you dont fu*k upp the har drive platters

[scottyseng]

10 minutes ago, HunterAP said:

-snip-

Yeah, if the drive was dropped, there's a high chance of the drive's heads being messed up and just causing mayhem on the drive platters the longer it's on. I would turn it over the professionals. They would be able to hopefully transplant the platters to a new drive and get the data that way. However, if a drive has been dropped, I would not want to use it as storage, period.

[Moonzy]

10 minutes ago, HunterAP said:

My friend only wants it as external storage, but if it's a lost cause then he'll just get an external hard drive.

i wouldnt try and use a dropped hard disk to save anything lol

because it might just die anyday

[HunterAP]

I figured that'd be the case, at least it was an interesting experience of trying to recover the files.

I'll try one last time to use Testdisk since it managed to recover some files, but I stopped the process since it was taking too long and I had to go to class.