Been a while since I've peeked around these parts but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.

I have an older Seagate Momentus 5400.6 2.5" drive, 250GB capacity, model ST9250315AS, and in the recent past I was in the middle of doing a secure erase on it (using Parted Magic's secure ATA erase tool). Of course, as my luck would have it, at some point in the process the power blinked - yes, the laptop had a battery, and yes it was plugged into the AC outlet, but for some reason even with all that so-called constant power applied it was enough to cause the secure ATA erase to skip or something and suddenly the whole process crapped out.

Not knowing what else I could possibly do at that moment I decided to power down the laptop entirely and then go back and attempt to do it again, of course everybody knows that won't work and I found out as soon as I booted the Dell Latitude E4310 I was using to do this process: I got that white screen with the black text telling me the hard drive was locked with a password and, well, that's that.

I didn't obviously have data on this drive that mattered hence the secure ATA erase process, but the drive was mechanically sound, had no bad sectors, etc, and it's a functional piece of hardware so I'd rather not just toss it in the garbage. One can never know precisely when having an extra hard drive could be useful so...

Is there any chance of making this drive useful again that doesn't require me buying all sorts of extra hardware like I see discussed so often or, is it just a dead drive and there's no hope whatsoever of getting it functional with some kind of software-based solution of any kind?

If it's toast, that's fine, I'll live and just buy another small capacity drive off eBay or something, but like many others, I just hate giving up on something that can be salvaged depending on the effort and time required.

If anyone has any useful info that might help me salvage this one, I'd appreciate hearing it, but if not then I don't mind being told to scrap it and toss it in the garbage either.

Thanks, and have fun, always...

Well the software used was the secure erase tool that's part of Parted Magic which is a bootable diagnostic tool utility (Linux based environment). I've used that tool hundreds of times before but this time, because of that power glitch, that's what caused the issues. Now, the thing is that whenever that tool is used it defaults to a password of "password" but for whatever reason that password doesn't work to unlock the drive, unfortunately, so I'm thinking something just got corrupted someplace because of that power glitch, sadly.

All my laptops are Dell Latitudes so, I don't have any other laptops that might get past that act of booting with a locked drive, unfortunately. And for the other methods, I suppose spending money to make a 250GB hard drive useful again is rather impractical as I could find another one for $10-15 these days in most places.

Anyway, just thought I'd toss the question out there and see what possibilities existed and you covered 'em so thanks for responding.

Have fun, always...

I admit I've tried that as well in the past: attach the drive to the SATA interface after the laptop/desktop has booted and then attempt to have MHDD refresh the interface and pick up the existence of the drive but that's never worked for me either, with about 8 different laptops (Dell, HP, even a few ThinkPads).

I'm just gonna toss the drive and that'll be that, it's not worth all the hassles I suppose, a shame to waste a perfectly functional hard drive for such a trivial thing but sometimes one simply has to realize that beating a dead horse isn't helping.

A couple of things you can try.......

I would use Victoria for Windows.

1. Just type the word password in the box.

2. Input the hex value for the word password: 70617373776f7264

With method 2 you might need to use a 32 byte password so it would need to be padded out with zeros? This would probably be the method to use with Mhdd.

just for future reference i think its safer to use a software like hard disk sentinel to zero fill the drive

thanks what i do and even with power outtages you will only need to format the drive after because it becomes an unlocated volume

Well I'll be damned.

Victoria for Windows worked, using it with a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter, go figure. The drive is showing some bad sectors now that weren't there before even considering the age of the drive but, that's impressive that it worked as well as it did so thank you very much for that method, dick.

Not that it matters but here's what I saw with Victoria and then CrystalDiskInfo.

Thanks again for the assistance, folks, it's greatly appreciated.