Hdd keeps reverting datas to original state.

[allnet7]

Hello everyone,

I have an old Dell inspiron 1525 and i took the seagate hdd to use it as backup drive.

For my astonishment when i deleted all active partitions and recreate a new one, everything goes fine till a few second later or after reconnecting the drive in a caddy, all previous partitions are back.

i tried every kind of hdd softwares: Victoria, mhdd, acronis, seagate, parted magic and so on but to no avail.
Even if i write a folder to it, after a few seconds it vanishes but the old data is untouched.
I did as last resort to try to find out if it was some kind of virus but nothing found, even rootkits.

My last thoughts are: is the drive is write protected? Is it a hardware failure?

hdd
Seagate Momentus ST9250827AS
Firm: 3.ADB
serial: 5RG5C5JR

Help is appreciated.

[allnet7]

First of all i would plug the drive to the system back again to discard any problem with the caddy / exteranl case.

With the drive connected to the system directly to the motherboard use winhex to write some 00000 to the first sectors of the drive and read them again to see if it did indeed wrote to he drive or not.
If not your drive have a physical problem and the best way for you to deal with it, as data is not needed, is to buy a new one.
Some drives can be locked on "read only" when it's internal firmware detects problems with the drive, as a measure of protecting itself from further damage.
But first MAKE SURE the problem is not with the CADDY.
Best regards.

Thank you for the fast reply Spildit.

I forgot to say that i did the swap to another laptop and tried all the programs named and more from my original post.
Result are the same even when the hdd is plugged to a motherboard directly.
I did some test with softwares like hddscan and many more but result are the drive is healthy as a horse.
That´s why i´m a little lost.

i´ll try zero writing to see if the problem still exist and will post the results.

p.s: i tried and trying erasing the drive as right now so zeroing is on the go. HDDscan is doing it but will try Winhex as suggested if i have the same results again.

Last edited by allnet7 on October 28th, 2013, 17:12, edited 1 time in total.

[allnet7]

First of all i would plug the drive to the system back again to discard any problem with the caddy / exteranl case.

With the drive connected to the system directly to the motherboard use winhex to write some 00000 to the first sectors of the drive and read them again to see if it did indeed wrote to he drive or not.
If not your drive have a physical problem and the best way for you to deal with it, as data is not needed, is to buy a new one.
Some drives can be locked on "read only" when it's internal firmware detects problems with the drive, as a measure of protecting itself from further damage.
But first MAKE SURE the problem is not with the CADDY.
Best regards.

Thank you for the fast reply Spildit.

I forgot to say that i did the swap to another laptop and tried all the programs named and more from my original post.
Result are the same even when the hdd is plugged to a motherboard directly.
I did some test with softwares like hddscan and many more but result are the drive is healthy as a horse.
That´s why i´m a little lost.

i´ll try zero writing to see if the problem still exist and will post the results.

Ok !
Please post full smart lof from MHDD or other tool, and also try to erase with MHDD and see if the drive show any error alike abort or err on the status register (in green).
My guess is that some faulty head or firmware is turning the drive in read-only mode.
Can you do a full scan with mhdd ? Does it complete without errors or abort ?

Will do my friend and i´ll post the results from mhdd. Thank you for your support.

[shahij]

During my lifetime I saw this type of 3 HDDs so far.

1. Maxtor 6E040L0. During FW scan, no error found. Selfscan from SA-C fixed the issue.
2. Quantum Fireball. Not fixed.
3. Samsung 2.5" HDD. all FW are ok. Left unfixed.

It's Read-only status somehow.