Question How much of a partition can be zeroed, but still remain readable?

[Random Tech Guy]

I’m working on recovering partitions from a hard drive for a client, the drive has 14 partitions, and lets just say they’re all encrypted. I’m using Linux Mint’s disks utility to create partition images of each partition. Which ended up telling me, 1 partition is totally unreadable, and the 975GB partition has about 2MB that is unreadable, and has been zeroed out. (It’s only through 190GB at the moment) anyone know how much can be zeroed out and still be usable/recoverable by the OS.


I should note, I am going to be wiping the drive, doing a fresh install, and probably using the images to recover the salvaged partitions.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I don't think, you can recover anything from damaged encrypted partition.
If you somehow manage to do that, I'd like to know how.

 

[RolandJS]

Did the client indicate what encryption process was used? And, of course, there are no known passwords nor recovery files, correct?
If yes and yes, SkyNetRising is absolutely correct, recovery chances are probably in the negative numbers.

 

[Random Tech Guy]

Did the client indicate what encryption process was used? And, of course, there are no known passwords nor recovery files, correct?
If yes and yes, SkyNetRising is absolutely correct, recovery chances are probably in the negative numbers.

The drive came from a PS4, and the research i’ve done makes it sound like it has some proprietary encryption. I did try the onboard repair tools, to no avail. I was kinda hoping that it might have enough meta data to recover small sections of data loss, and that maybe it was getting hung up on the 1 totally bad partition.

Will know more when I get back to the shop today.

 

[Random Tech Guy]

So, update and closer, let it run for ~12hrs (more) and the partition imager essentially hung, made it 36% of the way, and was estimating 4 days to complete. Total run time ~24hrs. Doing full wipe and reinstall.

Thanks for the input, was really hoping i’d have a real answer to it.