Proving the null hypothesis is still a valid piece of work but you would need to be able to address criticism of the choice of the original question (I'm having some of that trouble myself - it's very common) and probably publighing opportunities would be compromised. If it doesn't work at all - again you need to justify your choice and thoroughly explain why.
It's also wise to try to leave some time for a 'subplot' i.e. a related expt that is more likely to yeild interesting results. I put in a subplot in my 2nd year when it became clear I would have serious trouble getting enough data to draw a firm conclusions about the main issue. It means my end PhD will be a collection of related papers rather than one central piece but that's common with experimental PhDs.
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