The unstoppable hard drive
 

Here's a strange one.. I've gota Maxtor 80gb hard drive that you can write data to, but under no circumstances can data come off of the drive, even by low level formatting it. The low level format says it completes successfully, but when you reboot the PC, the data is still there! PowerMax diagnostics report the drive is A-Okay. Any advice?

is the drive locked via jumper?

I wasn't aware that there was a jumper setting like that, though it wouldn't surprise me if there was. The drive was screwed into the case and when I switched it from master to slave I started playing the "let's switch the jumpers until it works" game :D

I guess I'll have to go back and research that. I'm surprised that the system would continue to say yeah we're deleting, we're low level formatting, no problems here without throwing up any sort of write errors...

Stick it into a Mac...and format it there...then bring it back to the PC environment. No, you won't get cooties or anything :lol:

I once had a hard disk with a virus-infected track 0...the only way I was able to clean it was to format it in a Mac. heheheh....

Yipes. I don't have a spare Mac laying around here anywhere, though. Maxtor's web site doesn't really show a "delete protect" type of jumper configuration. I've heard of write protecting drives, but never "Delete protecting" them..

I suppose I could try to run my battery of hard drive wiping utilities and see if one of those works, but I'm kind of doubtful if the manufacturer's low level format utility didn't do anything. PC is at a friends house, anyway, so I won't get my hands on it until then.

Anyone else have any ideas besides throwing it in a Mac?

If it is protected on the OS level, you could always boot off a Knoppix disc and use fdisc. Of course, that won't get you around jumper protection.

ratbastid: Maxtor's bootable floppy PowerMax utility ran through a low-level format with no errors and reported a success, so we've ruled out Windows.

Why don't you download a Knoppix Linux Live CD, boot the cd, format it, then remove cd, reboot and voila!

bendsley: I'll give that a try, but that's not as destructive as low level formatting the drive. Maybe I need to put some adhesive on the platters so the data sticks ;)

super low level format it with steel wool. ;)

We took the easy way out and just replaced it with a more reliable Western Digital drive, though upon closer looking at it, there's a jumper going across two pins that Maxtor's site doesn't make any reference of. And this is kind of amusing, because you can write new data to it and remove the new data, but it's like the stuff that was on there before is permanently write protected.

I ran Partition Magic and was able to "successfully" delete the NTFS partition. Tried to create a linux partition and it gave me an error about 77% through. Deleted it, created an NTFS partition and magically it said the drive was about 80% full like it was before I started this whole mess. So I'm like what the hell, let's create a 2gb FAT32 partition. System rebooted. So I figured ya know what, even if it does start to work, I wouldn't trust it any further than I could throw it.

So now I have an 80gb paperweight ;)

the only thing i can think of to correct the problem of having the data on the drive and getting rid of it would be a D.O.D. HDD wipe. Heres a link to a nice little prog that i found. http://www.jetico.com/index.htm#/bcwipe.htm