Erase Hard

[washcloud]

...much like Bruce Willis, this DiamondMax plus 9 series drive of mine resists it all : to simply be formatted and even to be filled with zeros.

It all came out of the blue to my attention, when I one day was looking for some files that had recently captured from my pc-tv device : they were nowhere. Soon I realized that whenever I restarted the pc, no matter what changes there had been done to the drive, were no more. That is if I delete something, after the restart it's still there, or if i write something, it's never present (after restarting). The behaviour is similar to having Deep Freeze installed, which I have not. Or, to be more poetic about it, it looks as if the hard drive has entered some Groundhog Day mode of it's own...

I've tried to zero fill the drive with both HDD Guru's LLFTool and PowerMax's floppy version. Each attempt was supposed to had been completed normally, however the drive and its partitions are still intact (!).
I've been using zero filling utilities for quite some time now and this is the 1st time a hard drive gives me such...a hard time. All I can think of (especially after the floppy attempt failed as well) is that something got messed up in its firmware. Googling however for "cannot zero fill hard drive" wasn't helpful at all and same was a quick search for finding downloadable firmware for it (plus the idea of tampering with its firmware gives me far from positive vibes).

What the Google search did come up with though, considering something useful, was this forum. So I'm expecting from hdd gurus to enlighten me on why this freakin' behaviour of the hdd is taking place and if like I predicted the solution lies to reinstalling its firmware, apart from the confirmation, I'd be more than happy if someone indicated where to look for firmware files (I already did check the forum's files btw, but alas there's only a YAR51BWD one, while my drive reads YAR41BWD on its sticker).
If you think that even a firmware flashing won't do zip and the hdd's electronics have simply went berserk, pls be gentle about how you break it to me...

[fzabkar]

HDAT2 will tell you if your drive is password protected:
http://www.hdat2.com/

[washcloud]

...without even clicking at the link 1st, I have to ask "and how on earth might this be possible?!", since it had been operating normally (don't forget, it's not just that it won't let be wiped out - it will also not tolerate alterations like file writing or deleting after a pc restart...) for a long time already.

I will for sure however take a look on your suggestion and thanks for taking the time to reply to my post.



PS : Webber should have made more room for Vettel

[fzabkar]

It's behaving as if it is write protected. However, the fact that you can see the partitions would suggest that there is no password.

[washcloud]

It's behaving as if it is write protected.

...my thought exactly.
However, like you too stated (apart from the fact that I never got or getting any kind of "password needed" notification), if that was the case, I'd probably would have no access to its partitions (and I would most certainly not be able to write anything on it).

It's, like I said at my initial post, as if there's Deep Freeze running on the system,,,which though does not....

[BlackST]

It's a problem I have already solved : I have a solution but you have to send the drive to me.

P.S. you cannot update or write anything to drive in this state, it will refuse EVERYTHING. No it's not a matter of password or security.

Plan B : trash the drive.

[washcloud]

It's a problem I have already solved : I have a solution but you have to send the drive to me.

P.S. you cannot update or write anything to drive in this state, it will refuse EVERYTHING. No it's not a matter of password or security.

Plan B : trash the drive.

...any info at least about what's causing this behaviour of the drive, cavaliere?

[unknown]

...any info at least about what's causing this behaviour of the drive, cavaliere?

Unfortunately, Info = solution. (in your case at least)

Good luck

[washcloud]

...why so "unfortunately"?

He btw said "he knows how to fix it" and I asked him to describe what's going on with the drive.

[BlackST]

What's going on with the drive ? It's "read only".

[washcloud]

Α read only drive? Never heard of such - and even if such exists, the thing is that the drive used to function normally UNTIL one day, it out of the blue changed its behaviour. How can this be?

[fzabkar]

The data recovery industry is a closed shop. It's a bit like a fraternity of Masons, only the secret handshakes are exchanged via PM. Some individuals, such as unknown20010, are helpful when the occasion permits, ie when the information is in the public domain. When he says that "Info = solution", he means that the information required to solve your problem is of a commercially sensitive nature.

On the other side of the coin are people such as BlackST whose sole reason for existence, at least on this forum, seems to be to annoy and intimidate newcomers such as yourself. He takes a perverse pleasure in telling you that he knows something that you don't. However, we'll never know if that's true because, to my knowledge, he's never actually helped anyone, even accidentally. In fact, if you ask him for the time of day, he'll probably tell you to invest in a Rolex and read the manual. I reckon you could program a bot to generate the same verbiage that he does.

As for your problem, I wish I could help you, but I'm not a DR guy. One thing that may provide some insight into the problem may to retrieve the drive's SMART data, and then retrieve it again after an hour or so. SMART data are written to the platters, so if there is a difference in the attribute values (eg Power On Hours Count), then this would rule out physical write problems.

BTW, here is a datasheet for Write-Only Memory (WOM):
http://www.national.com/rap/files/datasheet.pdf
http://www2.vmi.edu/Faculty/squirejc/Re ... Memory.pdf

[washcloud]

Well whenever I bump onto some Aussie on the Internet, I usually soon find out that he is a major
you-know-what.
So do feel proud to be considered an exception

Thanks for taking the time to enlighten me about how stuff works around here. To however tell you the truth, I was already almost certain that it's exactly how you described it for me.
This means that I already got how unknown20010 put it - I nonetheless kept asking, so to maybe at least get an answer to "why?" (thinking that this after all is a forum, plus no-one has made an attempt to contact me through pm, offering payed solution, etc...), if not to "and how do I fix it?".
Considering that I found no other similar cases on a not so brief Google search I performed (neither anybody had respective feedback on a local but quite populated hardware forum I am member of for some years now), I thought mine wouldn't be a case that somebody would double-think about giving me the info I asked for (in the sense that it wouldn't be like giving away vital occupation secrets for free - but more like an academic answer that wouldn't even directly solve my issue).
Plus, since the hdd is operational, it actually isn't a matter of data recovery, but one of utilizing an otherwise "useless" drive, that nowadays can come for a considerably low sum, after all...That's btw why I didn't ask BlackST, when he "offered" to send him the drive, about details how/where/how much etc - but I rather kept kindly asking about what the problem then was.

Finally, thanks for the thought and suggestion of comparing S.M.A.R.T. attributes - I already thought about it too though (yet I never got into the trouble of checking it out, since it seemed pointless, under the notion that the drive clearly tolerates no data alteration after each pc restart and it most certainly isn't a "software" issue, meaning a bug of some kind, 'cause it would have been nuked alright, after my filling with zeros through DOS attempts).
...I just didn't get the idea behind the PDF data sheets you linked me to : were you simply trying to be facetious (no problem if you did, I'm a sucker for teasing as well), about "WOM"...? 'Cause otherwise, and after having had a look on them, I don't see how they could be of help, in my trying to understand the situation that I'm faced with...


Anyway, thanks again man for trying to be of aid.



PS : I still think that Webber should have given the German some more descent amount of space...

[BlackST]

HDD is "operational" means you can NOW read data out of it, in this state, but sooner or later it will stop working. You'll see it ID as "Maxtor Calypso" at POST and then "Primary/Secondary drive failure".

[washcloud]

Well, that's a first. I've been dealing with hdds for quite a long time, but never experienced THIS way of them dying before.
So what you're saying is that this is just some IC failing?

[BlackST]

There's always a first time for everything. It happens.

[fzabkar]

Your impression of Aussies is all too understandable. Believe me, it's no fun being a wog in this country. As for Aussie cultcha, just watch The Footy Show, if your brain can stand it.

Your observation about occupational secrets occurred to me also. As you say, you already have full access to your data, so you are not in need of data recovery services. You certainly wouldn't pay a DR company to repair a HD under such circumstances. Either someone helps you repair your drive, or it ends up in landfill. ISTM that a DR guy would have nothing to lose by helping you. On the contrary, there would have to be a PR value in doing so. Unfortunately, PR values are not quantifiable, so they don't appear as a credit in the ledger.

I don't know what to make of BlackST's latest post, except that he appears to be predicting a failure in the read circuitry in the near future. FWIW, prior to his post, I had been thinking that your drive may be in write protect mode (SCSI drives have a Write Protect jumper). If so, then this could be because the MCU has detected a failure of some kind, and is endeavouring to safeguard your data. However this begs the question, why is the drive not reporting an error condition after each write?

Alternatively, is it possible that the drive's write logic is faulty, and that the MCU is unaware of it? That's why I asked you to examine the SMART reports. The SMART data, eg reallocated sectors, write error rate, may also provide other clues.

Something else you could try is to enable the drive's Write-Read-Verify feature set, if available. This would force the drive to examine the data it has just written.

I believe Hitachi's Feature Tool is one application that can enable this feature:
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/f ... de_198.pdf

One more thing that may be of interest is to try HD Tune's write benchmark:
http://www.hdtune.com/

As for the WOM, yes, I was being facetious. The WOM is a fictitious device created by a bored Signetics engineer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-only_memory

For example, see the graph of "Number of Remaining Pins" versus "Number of Socket Insertions".

[BlackST]

In THIS ACTUAL state drive won't write or change anything anywhere until it is fixed (and there's one case where it cannot be fixed also - haven't seen the drive so it can be one problem or another one).