[blincoln]

Do you still have the drive? You might be able to recover the content. The level of difficulty might be anything from "plug it into an adapter and make an image with dd" to "find a working drive of the same type and start swapping parts other than the platters" though.

[supermatou]

No, I don't have it anymore. I kept it around for 3 or 4 years, trying various methods to revive it, then threw it away when I took a job in New Zealand, hoping to move there for good. Well, that didn't work out and I came back after a few years, but the drive (and many other things) were lost in the process.

Also: the drive was absolutely dead, it wouldn't power up. I even tried to change its controller - I took it off another Conner drive, installed it on the deceased one - and nothing happened. On that occasion I realized that, even though they were the same model/capacity, Conner had used different electronics for different batches.

Ironically, the drive was built like a tank: never again I saw a hard-drive with a casing that thick (looked like cast iron).