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Hi,
I have come accross a broken hard drive. It cannot be read, written to, or formatted. But it can be detected by the BIOS, and it can tell what make and model the drive is. Could this drive be salvaged? The information on it is not important.

Thanks,

-Stephen

P.S.
The drive is a Maxtor 40GB drive. Model 4D040H2

If it cannot be read/written then the disk heads or platters are probably damaged, without the ability to seek the drive and/or something to magnetize to store data on it isn't going to very useful. The make and manufacture are being provided by the drive's ROM, that doesn't show anything meaniful about the state of it.

Had that too with one I bought. Tested it in all ways possible for a few days (formatting in Win98SE, in WinXP, in Knoppix, using HD Recovery programs, etc. etc), but nothing made it work properly. It did format under WinXP, but still couldn't use it. Took it back to the shop, they gave it a quick test of two minutes and gave me a different one (same model, though), which worked instantly (after changing IDE-cable, as that one was b0rked too ::) Btw... HD didn't work on other comps either)

If you just bought it new, I suggest you just take it back to the shop. They should give you a different one in return that ought to work.

It might be password protected. If so, you can't remove that. Try to search the internet for tools to find that out.

From what Stephen has said to me, the hard-drive os off eBay, and why would you buy computer peripherals from a site where you don't get to even meet the person selling... what if they are some kind of criminal or adulterer who wants to get rid of evidence? It seems like a big chance to take...

Actually calum, I said that I was thinking about buying a drive off e-bay, but the broken one I have came out of a computer I was fixing for some friends.

-Stephen

P.S. who cares what it has on it when you buy it. the first thing you would do would be to format it.

Stephen wrote: P.S. who cares what it has on it when you buy it. the first thing you would do would be to format it.

Perhaps. But there's always ways to recover the information that was previously on it. If the police can trace a criminal's PC, or a stolen PC to yours, it will be taken from you, even if you did buy it in good faith.

Actually (I think it would be the second time we'd be talking about this), if you overwrote the whole HD with random bytes a few hundred times, there's almost no way anyone could get any data from it, that was there previously. Just to be sure, you can also use a strong magnet on the disc, and if you know the disc will be checked, create some bogus installations and just format them, to hide the fact you've been overwriting the disc.

My sister's friend's father is actually a data recovery technician, and has done work for the Queensland Police is that wake of all that child pornography floating around the web. He told me that it is possible to recover plenty of data off of a HD that has been formatted several times. I guess after 100 times then nothing could be recovered from that homogenised mass of crapola.

Calum wrote: He told me that it is possible to recover plenty of data off of a HD that has been formatted several times.

How do you define the term "formatting"? Meaning:

1. using the command "format"? Yeah, that should be very easy though. Your data will remain on the disk though. When you "format" the harddisk is being checked and a file system is being created. Nothing more
2. Write all 0's to the harddisk. Tough one, but it's possible. Has to do with 1 and 0 and some different values like 1,05 and 0,05. There are some articles about it on the internet, I think.

I guess after 100 times then nothing could be recovered from that homogenised mass of crapola.

Mm, 100 times is just too many I think 35 times will do. (There was an algorithm though, can't remember the name)

35 times... sounds like the Gutmann's method to me.

...and a quick Google gives me his website

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/

The paper on the method being located here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/p ... e_del.html

For those of you that are lazy, you can cut through the theory and get the basic info around halfway down.

TheUnbeliever wrote: 35 times... sounds like the Gutmann's method to me.

Yup, I meant that. As I said, I had forgotten the name