MHDD Won't Scan, Erase, or NHPA Hitachi SATA 2.5" HDDs

[shaunm138]

I have been using the MHDD 4.6 program to scan/repair HDDs for over 3 years.
The program is run on a floppy disk on P4 desktops which have no hard drives installed in them.
We have been having a problem for some reason with 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB, and 120GB SATA hard drives where the program will not let me SCAN, ERASE, or NHPA the drives.
They are all Hitachi brand with various sizes and part numbers.

Please let me know if anyone else has had this problem and if there is a solution since I cannot resell the drives if I don't know if they are good or not, especially if I can't erase the information that may be on them. Is it possible the drives are just bad, something to do with the PCB?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[BlackST]

Drive locked or firmware failure maybe ?

[shaunm138]

Well normally when the drive is locked it will tell me in big red letters "THIS DRIVE IS LOCKED BY AN ATA PASSWORD"
As far as a firmware failure, would there be any way to check or fix that by say hooking it to a computer with internet via USB and seeing if I can download or update drivers for that specific model?
Thanks for your suggestions.

[Vulcan]

the program will not let me SCAN, ERASE, or NHPA the drives.

What do you mean exactly by "will not let [you]"? A little hand doesn't come out of the PC and prevent you pressing the keys, so we're all trying to guess what specific behaviour you mean. I can think of several possible interpretations, but I don't know which one (if any) of my guesses is true in this case...

Therefore please give full answers to the following:

i) Attach screenshots to your reply (good enough so that we can read the text on the screen - but no need for massive jpg files!) with at least 2 different "problem" drives, showing the screen after running MHDD and:
a) hitting F2 (or typing "EID") for each drive, then
b) hitting F4 (or typing "SCAN") for each drive.

So that's a minimum of 4 screenshots - 2 (one from running EID, one from running SCAN) from each drive. Then we'll have some hard data to look at, and see if there is something to suggest where the problem is.

ii) For the (at least 2) drives whose MHDD screenshots you supply, do these "problem" drives spin-up, and stay spinning when power is applied?

iii) What is common about the "problem" drives e.g. did you get them from the same place / vendor?

iv) Do you know what equipment the "problem" drives were used in, before you got them (e.g. PCs, or something more specialised, or you don't know)?

v) Were these supposed to be working drives when you bought them, or could they actually be faulty? If you say that they cannot be faulty, what evidence do you have for that? If they were supposed to be working, what evidence did the vendor give you for that?

With full answers to those 5 points, readers will have a better chance of giving appropriate replies.

[shaunm138]

What I mean by the program "will not let me" is that the program locks up (freezes) whenever I type in the commands mentioned, SCAN, EID, NHPA, ID, none of them give me any results or information when typed in, most of the time I just get the green "BUSY" indicator at the top and it will stay like that for the entire day unless I hold in the power button and do a forced shutdown. Once restarted it locks up in the same fashion.
i) Here are the screenshots you requested, the computers do not have HDDs so I took some pictures with a camera.

DRSC, DRDY, and BUSY indicators light up and program freezes showing no information
1st drive on EID



1st drive on SCAN, same indicators



1st drive details/part numbers (not sure if needed)



Just an --LBA-- indicator shows up and program freezes showing no information
2nd drive on EID



2nd drive on SCAN, same indicator



2nd drive details/part numbers



ii) The problem drives in question do power on, they do spin up, they are recognized by MHDD as it will show the mfgr part number details of the drive when it is attached at the initial screen that sometimes comes up, but not any information when i input ID or EID commands, etc.

iii) The only thing that is common about the drives is that they are all manufactured by Hitachi. Some of the drives were bought from vendors and some came out of the end-of-life equipment (laptops) that we get in, all from various vendors around the country.

iv) As the drives come from many different sources I do not know the given history of any of the drives, what information they contained, or for what specific purpose they were used.

v) The specific drives which I have attached pictures for were bought from a vendor as tested, working, and guaranteed with a warranty. I do not know what software or testing they use to consider their drives "good". I have had drives with the same part numbers work fine also, which I find strange, to have two drives with the same part numbers and one will go through scanning fine and the other will give me these problems so it can't be a specific PN. Other drives which have the problems may not have been bought to be working, as I said we accumulate drives in non-working and working condition from various suppliers and I do not know at this point which are which.

Thank you for being so thorough in your requests, I know that unfortunately is does not provide much if any information that may be necessary to resolve the issue.

[lcoughey]

Rather than use a SATA/IDE bridge, what happens when you connect them directly to a SATA port on the system?

[Vulcan]

@shaunm138,

Thanks for that info - those photos are exactly what I was looking for. The lack of a common supplier to you, may suggest (as you commented earlier) that the (only relevant) common factor is the drive manufacturer.

a) As other members have already said, I certainly concur that the apparemt use of some kind of SATA adapter is a concern - please can you eliminate that (in case your issue is an incompatibility between that and Hitachi drives) and re-test using a native SATA port. Does your "test PC" motherboard have one (or more) of those?

b) For the second drive, with the Lenovo monitor, there is no visible line showing the contents of the ATA Status register (e.g. DRDY, BUSY etc.), whereas that line is shown for the first drive, with the IBM monitor. That difference is a surprise - unless it's just a monitor adjustment problem.

c) Just for grins, if there is a delay before you can use a native SATA port, and assuming that you are using an IDE port on the motherboard via a SATA adapter, do you have a choice of different IDE controller settings in that PC BIOS? If so, what are the alternative settings and have you tried them?

[shaunm138]

Thank you all for your replies.
I have tried to test the drives in question on a laptop using the built in SATA port rather than an adapter/bridge.
Most of the test machines are old P4 Dell Optiplex GX260's so they mostly do not have native SATA ports thus why we have used the adapter, and I have used it on thousands of SATA drives without any problem, until coming in to this issue.
Even with the drive in the laptop directly connected to the onboard SATA port it still gives me the same problem by locking up/freezes when I try to type any of the commands mentioned.

@Vulcan, as for the second photo, it does not have to do with the monitor that is simply all it showed (admittedly it is rare) but most of the time I get the 3 other indicators which light up including the green BUSY one.
All of the test machines have the BIOS settings set in the same way, and having tested so many SATA drives on them before I know that the port configurations and everything are fine. There are no real options to speak of in the controller settings as they are a rather basic, older BIOS.

Unfortunately at this point given all the evidence and following everyone's suggestions I cannot come to any other conclusion other than the hard drives are simply bad or something has rendered them inaccessible making me unable to test them properly.

I think I will try one more last ditch effort which will be to use a different program inside of Windows such as HDDScan or SeaTools or any other such kind of application and see if I can find some different results.

Thanks again for all of your help.