USB dashcam drive issues, seeking assistance to aid law enforcement

[MentalNomad]

My car recently observed the vicinity of a crime (end of January.)

Immediately afterwards, the local police asked me if my car captured footage; I had sentry mode on and they were looking for footage from the past hour. We pulled up the footage and reviewed it together, twice. All worked fine.

Today, a few days later, I had a visit from the FBI. They are looking for any footage from a slightly later period. I said I *may* have footage, depending on whether Sentry got triggered.

But when the agents and I sat down in the car to review, I was unable to bring up *any* footage. The car reported a USB drive error.

I tried re-seating the USB cable and even rebooting the car. No help.

I have a 64 GB SSD that I've been using in the car (Model 3) since 2019 on a USB adapter cable. When plug it into the USB port on a computer, it appears that it's showing up as Unformatted.

A drive check reports that all sectors are good, and S.M.A.R.T. reports Status OK.
Car is on 2022.44.30.10.

Any suggestions on any potential recovery or pointers to related issues are welcome. It's possible that it is worn out; it's possible that it was affected by the extreme cold three nights ago (for some reason, the driver's side window was open about 6 inches overnight and would not close in the morning until I ran it all the way down; I had *not* left the window open on Friday, so I have no explanation for this "glitch.")

(And, as I type this, I also wonder if it wasn't a glitch, and someone took pains to wipe my drive? I find this extremely unlikely. Also, we very like have no useful footage for LE, even if the drive were fine, but I want to find anything can find.)

The car shows this:

And if I tap to view Sentry Mode, I get this:

I've put a new drive in the car and have the hard drive. I've only mounted it via USB adapter, but can mount it in a SATA port if there's something worth trying. I can also just give the thing to the FBI, but unless it gets to a specialist, I'm may be more competent to try to get data off this thing than the field agents.

Any thoughts?

 

[MentalNomad]

Pulled a more detailed S.M.A.R.T.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- T-64 63.0 GB ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Serial Number: 987061350795 Firmware: T170317d Rotational Speed: -- (SSD) Buffer Size: -- Power On Hours: 8606 Hour Power On Count: 27698 Total Host Reads: -- Total Host Writes: -- Transfer Mode: SATA/600 | SATA/600 Standard: ACS-4 | ---- Features: S.M.A.R.T., 48bit LBA, NCQ, TRIM Temperature: -- °C Health Status: Good -- S.M.A.R.T. -------------------------------------------------------------- ID Sta Cur Wor Thr RawValues AttributeName (See notes below) 09 G 100 100 __0 00000000219E Power-On Hours 0C G 100 100 __0 000000006C32 Power Cycle Count A7 G 100 100 __0 000000000000 Vendor Specific A8 G 100 100 __0 000000000000 Vendor Specific A9 G 100 100 _10 000000000000 Vendor Specific AB G __0 __0 __0 000000000000 Vendor Specific AC G __0 __0 __0 000000000000 Vendor Specific AD G 200 200 __0 0002015A00CA Vendor Specific AF G 100 100 _10 000000000000 Vendor Specific B4 G 100 100 _20 000000000046 Vendor Specific BB G 100 __0 __0 000000000039 Vendor Specific C0 G 100 100 __0 000000000000 Unsafe Shutdown Count CE G 200 200 __0 000000000002 Vendor Specific CF G 200 200 __0 00000000015A Vendor Specific D0 G 200 200 __0 0000000000CA Vendor Specific E7 G _94 _94 __5 000000000006 Vendor Specific F1 G 100 100 __0 000A9C8099FC Total Host Writes F2 G 100 100 __0 00008405501C Total Host Reads F5 G 100 100 __0 00001FB735C5 Vendor Specific Notes: Sta: Status(G: Good | W: Warning | B: Bad | U: Unknown) Cur: Current Wor: Worst Thr: Threshold RawValues: Raw Values AttributeName: Attribute Name ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- DiskGenius V5.4.2.1239 https://www.diskgenius.com 2023-02-06 18:54:05

 

[MentalNomad]

This drive had a previous life, during which it should have accumulated several thousand hours of runtime. The running hours, 8606 are probably mostly from the previous life. I don't drive that much (40k miles since 2019)... and for much of that time, I did not run Sentry mode. It's just dumb luck that I've turned it on, lately.

The power on count of 27,698 looks pretty crazy to me!!! Is it common for the car to cycle the drive on so frequently? Perhaps every time it wakes up?