hi all,

as the topic states i'm dealing with a "FreeAgent" Seagate HDD ST31000528AS (label says firmware is CC35) 1TB disk.
i'm trying to save this HDD from being harvested for magnets, but it seriously wants a new career holding stuff to my fridge...

The HDD is physically sound as far as i can tell, OS detects the drive, i can read data off it, but i cant write to it, i cant take ownership of the drive or files on it, i cant format it. Tried using killdisk, tried low level format tools, tried different OS'es and the best i've gotten is for it to be read as RAW (which subsequent efforts appear to have it recognized as NTFS and assigned a logical drive that i can browse). I've never seen a drive so stubborn and i'm out of options, so i turn to you fine folks. i've poked around on the webs for a while and did some reading and it appears that this drive is somehow locked by seagate. i've seen talk of using SeDiv to re-write the vendor track but i'm hoping theres a (free) way to get this drive to submit to my keystrokes. many of the tools i've seen here are completely foreign to me (SeDiv, MHDD, Victoria, etc) so i dont really know where to begin. i'm certainly willing to put the effort in to learn my way around this problem but some help would probably save me several hours of banging my head against the wall

Give up, sometimes drives loose ability to write....

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www.datarecoveryne.com

is there a way to determine definitively that this is the case? From what i understand if the drive is locked none of the methods i've tried would work, is that correct? I've got plenty of free time to tool around with this and since i could use the space, i'd like to know for sure rather than risk throwing money out the window.

If your "free" tools can check head functionality and then security status and then eventually revert the problem this is what to do.
Depending on how the drive is locked (if it is the problem) or there is a certain thing going on that give the symptom you are experiencing you may have to deal with firmware and this is where free tools STOP.
A better diagnose maybe can help.

How to Test Seagate Drives' Heads for HDD Repair:
http://www.datarecoverytools.co.uk/2011 ... dd-repair/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.