Two Uninitialized Hard Drives: Zero-Byte Images, SMART Good and an ATA Password Prompt
Do not initialize either disk or assume the failures are identical. In this two-HDD imaging case on Reddit, a 2.5-inch and a 3.5-inch 500GB hard drive both appeared as Not Initialized. HDD Raw Copy produced mostly zero data, and GNU ddrescue reported no useful rescued bytes even after changing adapters and reversing the pass. One drive also produced a password prompt on direct SATA. The poster said the files were not especially important and was deciding whether further home experiments were worthwhile.
Why Do SMART Good and Uninitialized Not Settle the Diagnosis?
Not Initialized describes what Windows can currently use, not whether all sectors can be read. A drive may identify its model yet fail normal reads because of a device, firmware, security, adapter or media problem. The supplied SMART report showed a WD model with a Good summary and no pending or reallocated sectors, but that summary does not explain the unreadable imaging result.
A request for an ATA or BIOS drive password is also not the same as Windows asking for a new partition. If the prompt is genuinely drive-security related, it requires its own diagnosis. It must not be interpreted as proof that both drives share the same defective media or that the poster should try password-bypass or security-erasing utilities.
When Is Another Scan Unhelpful?
Separate the Drive States
- One drive returns only unreadable blocks: stop retries, reverse passes and formatting attempts. GNU ddrescue tracks readable and unreadable areas with a mapfile; 0B successfully rescued is not a recoverable disk image to run file recovery on.
- One drive asks for a password: record exactly which drive and which system or firmware presents the prompt. Check prior ownership and any legitimate configured credential before touching security settings.
- Another reader or SATA adapter behaves differently: note the model, detected capacity and whether a read-only sector read is possible; do not repeatedly power-cycle a drive that stalls the host or stays unreadable.
Because the owner does not value the data highly, the rational stopping point may be now. If the content later turns out to matter, preserve the original drives and request a specialist's separate evaluation for each one. File-recovery software such as Recoverit needs an accessible, readable source or usable image; it cannot rebuild an image that contains essentially no recovered data.