I worked for a satellite company installing receivers at customers houses. Every now and then I would get a bad receiver and would just through it away. One day I got the bright idea to take the hard drive out of one of them, which is a WD 320GB 3.5" SATA HDD, to put on my computer. So I went to radio shack and bought a external enclosure, got home and went to try to format it, but I've ran into a problem.

I'm thinking the HDD is either LOCKED or just broken. I would rather think its locked for now, but here are the steps I'm taking and the errors I get when I try to format.

I connected the external HDD to my MacBook via USB. I turn the HDD enclosure on, it lights up and blinks for a second. After its been powered on, I get a pop up that says, Disk Insertion, The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

It then gives me three options, Initialize... Ignore, and Eject. I press Initialize, it takes me to the Disk Utility application. This is where I think that the HDD is just locked. The computer kind of recognizes the HDD. In the Disk Utility app, it shows a different HDD then whats connected. As I said above, its a WD 320GB HDD, in the Disk Utility is shows a HDD as a 2TB HDD. This is weird, but I still continue. So I select the HDD that I want to format/erase. I click the Erase tab, then erase. A progress bar comes up saying, creating partition map. It'll sit their for about 2 minutes, then I get a pop up message saying, Disk Erase failed Disk erase failed with the error: Input/output error.

This is were I think that HDD might just be broken. This is why I'm writing here today. Is their anybody that surfs these forums that could help me out with possibly getting this HDD working?

LOCKED.

So it seems another person thinks it's locked. Now can somebody point me in the right direction on getting it unlocked? The only process I know of, but can't try on this HDD, is hot swapping. I've read about programs that should unlock it, but I've yet to find one that'll run on a mac.

So basically, what do I need to do to get this HDD unlocked? Help would be greatly appreciated.

Download mhdd and run that to determine if its locked or faulty.

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Zero Alpha: zeroalpha.com.au
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So I finally got to use a Windows bases computer. I connected the HDD, I hear a sound that something was connected, but I don't see the HDD in My Computer. So I go into the Disk Management and I can see the HDD in the list, but it says its unknown and not initialized. Then I'll right click the HDD and click on, "Initialize Disk". A pop up comes up with two radial options. 1. MPR 2. GPT I select the GPT and click ok.

This is the error that comes up right after I click ok; "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)".

I did download MHDD, but I'm really not sure how to use it. I open it up and press SHIFT - F3, only two devises show up, none of which are the HDD I'm trying to erase.

Does this mean that the HDD is bad, or just locked?

I did try some other partitioning on my mac and I keep getting a, "Permission Denied" pop up. This is were I still think its just locked.

Any ideas?

I also downloaded Western Digitals LifeGuard program. It'll find the HDD, but it wont give any information about the HDD. It just displays it as USB. If I try to write zeros to it, I get an error saying, "Cable test::Read diagnostics sector error!"

I even tried turning the computer off and plugging the HDD into the mother board. The computer doesn't recognize it, even in the BIOS. In the BIOS it displays the SATA port as, " ". Just blank.

So should I declare this HDD broken?