Locked Hard Drive

[d33pt]

I have a hard drive pulled out of a set top box.. some guy at work gave it to me and said he couldn't get it to work... the drive seems to be locked somehow.. it is a seagate 40giger.. BIOS detects it fine.. but nothing after that will. I've tried Spinrite5, FDISK, and Win2k's drive management.. Nothing. The only thing that detects it is the dlgchk.exe file from WD.. but it gives a sector read error on that drive and dies with a fatal error.. I want to give it a low level but I dont know of any generic utils that'll work. Seagate's drive diag tools dont detect it either. Any help?

 

[GunDog]

If the drive is locked then attach as d:
goto dos then type, unlock d:
BUT, that doesn't appear to be the problem.
Is it a seagate or western digital? You mentioned using both manuf's diag software. Only one or the other will work.
If the WD software detected it as a WD chances are its a WD.
The diag software doesn't say lowlevel format anymore. But, it does say write 1's and 0's. That is the lowlevel format.
Anyway, if it reads a sector error and dies a horrible death then the drive is toast.
You can still try the above, maybe you'll get lucky. (doubtful though)

 

[d33pt]

actually the dlgchk.exe is Data Lifeguard BIOS Check program... it checks if your bios is supporting your drive correctly, if not you can use their EZ BIOS drive overlay TSR.. the problem is that nothing sees the drive.. if there was something that'll let me low level it, then it might work, but i've heard that some kind of lock is burned into the ROM itself..