Yeah, adam brought it over to my place and i made a dump of the hard drive. completely blank, not even old partition information existed on it.
we also attempted to get several carts to be recognized. nothing with a bootloader on it that we were willing to try (such as the gamer's cart) would work. we got Marvel Super Heroes (US original) to boot and recognize my 1mb/4mb switched cart and i sent that with him along with a JVC/Victor MPEG card. also lightly installed a Phantom universal into the unit (no solder so it can be easily removed, replaced, or reinstalled if needed) and tried booting up japanese games with the region changed to US, which did work.
drive.google.com