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Hello everyone, I'm trying to recover my files from a damaged HDD.
My mac mini doesn't recognize the drive and every time I plug the thing it takes forever as it's trying to read it.
Yesterday I got it to show in TestDisk on the first try and I was doing the analysis, but after like 3-4 hours or so I got a notification saying that I had little space left and I was like "Huh??? I should have over 100gb left!"
Turns out that the log file that TD was creating was what had eaten up all that space. So, had to abort mission.
Well, thankfully there's a no-log option, right? However, now whenever I can finally get the disk to show, the size is wrong. It should be a 2TB disk, but it says it's 144.1 PB!
Every time I plug in the disk the beeping and clicking sounds get worse and worse (though that may just be me imagining it) so I'm worried that I may not have a lot of time to try to get this to work.
Any help would be much appreciated.

My mac mini doesn't recognize the drive and every time I plug the thing it takes forever as it's trying to read it.

You probably have a dammaged drive.
Before duplicating it as desribed in the manual, you could read the SMART parameters and publish them here.
Do not install software on your possibly broken drive.

Instructions how to use smartmontools can be found here:

viewtopic.php?p=33390#p33390

Thanks for replying recuperation.
Yes, it's a damaged drive. The HDD fell from a very low height, but it was nonetheless enough that the drive got damaged. It's an Ultra Thin Seagate Barracuda.
Managed to get smartmontools to work (at last…) but now the drive is just refusing to cooperate.
Going to System Information>Hardware>USB is the only acknowledgement I'm getting that the drive is indeed plugged in, Disk Utility simply doesn't recognize it.
Seems that first try was my only one.

OK got it to work aaaaand

The device doesn't support it…
Smartctl open device: /dev/disk2 failed: Operation not supported by device

Using sat,12 and sat,16
/dev/disk2: Type 'sat,16+...': Not a device of type 'scsi'
=======> VALID ARGUMENTS ARE: ata, scsi[+TYPE], nvme[,NSID], sat[,auto][,N][+TYPE], usbcypress[,X], usbjmicron[,p][,x][,N], usbprolific, usbsunplus, sntjmicron[,NSID], sntrealtek, intelliprop,N[+TYPE], jmb39x[-q],N[,sLBA][,force][+TYPE], jms56x,N[,sLBA][,force][+TYPE], auto, test <=======

Isn't there some way to get it to recognize the correct size again?
Like I said, it displayed the correct capacity the first time I tried.
I was able to analyze the disc. I only had to quit TestDisk since the log file exceeded 100gb and I ran out of space.

Your drive is broken. The size of your log file is caused by error messages. Please contact a professional recovery service.

sigh…
Thanks for replying.