my dad's excavating some land so he can build a house, and he found a HDD buried out in the middle of fucking nowhere (50+ miles from nearest town in the middle of 10-house "village") -- no case, no wrap, just the drive. It works, but when we read it it was zeroed save for a few bad sectors that didn't take. It also makes a horrible cricket-like noise (https://picosong.com/w8qYn but much louder in reality, shitty phone mic) and it worries me.

Why does it worry u?

That's..actually kinda weird/creepy. I don't know how I would feel about even touching a drive I found in the middle of nowhere

I reckon if you say it's zeroed you already tried running a file recovery program on it?

Make a text file on it describing that and how you found it and rebury it somewhere else.

Maybe copy some other files on it first, whatever suits your fancy.

Optionally put it on some geotracking website to make sure it gets found eventually. :P

Zeroed -- do you mean you've tried to scan it for files to recover, or have you opened it w/ xxd, filtered out all-zero lines and saw there's nothing left?

It may had been encrypted before nuking the FAT/GPT you know..

📌

Honestly, I would have just handed it in to the police. If it was buried deliberately you have no idea what shit someone was hiding there.

I would dd it into file (depending on size) and then try analyze that as loop disk.

Or maybe it's just an old dead drive that someone cleared out before throwing it in the middle of nowhere (like an asshole)

(jesus this exploded)

To those wondering about how I know it was zeroed, I cloned it with dd and removed all the 00 bytes. It ended up being 27 bytes, and as it's an old drive, i'm thinking they were just bad/dying sectors that didn't accept the write. They're also not contiguous, so it's nothing I can use for anything.

No, it's not radioactive @Nanos, i did check. It's an old 2GB IDE drive, so it may have fallen, I guess, but it's been zeroed and isn't in a million pieces like it should be if it fell from the sky. It was also found right by the base of a tree, so there's that too.

@norman70688 nope. Not yet, at least!

@mojo2012 it makes cricket noises and gets really hot. i'm a little scared it'll end up going Quantum Fireball on me (it's not a Quantum Fireball but it might explode on me nonetheless)

@Nanos It's a 3.5" drive. It's near a road, so that may be where it came from lol. There's nothing else there, and the tree roots were growing over it, so it's been there a while.