Toshiba MG09ACA18TE now bricked?

[skullmonkey]

Hi all,

I have a question concerning my drive, I try to sum it up shot:

I wanted to secure "delete" data on my Toshiba MG09ACA 18TB. I googled a bit and used:

hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass NULL /dev/sdf
hdparm --user-master m --security-set-pass NULL /dev/sdf

and then I used --sanitize-crypto-scramble. Somehow (can't say really) process got interrupted.

Since then the drive is LOCKED but not FROZEN. But I can't unlock the drive using the password I set and know. I did some research and found out, that with some drives (firmware issue?) it is not good to use NULL as password.

Looks like Parted Magic had same issues 10 years ago and changed the process to set a real password.

Question is now, is there still a way to rescue the drive?

Kind regards,
Skullmonkey

[WebClaw]

What's the output of?

sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdf | grep -iE "security|frozen|locked"

you said:
drive is LOCKED but not FROZEN
That’s actually good, means the system BIOS didn’t set the ATA “frozen” flag.

I'd try:

sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-unlock NULL /dev/sdf
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-unlock null /dev/sdf
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-unlock "" /dev/sdf
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-unlock "NULL" /dev/sdf
sudo hdparm --user-master u --security-unlock "null" /dev/sdf

[skullmonkey]

hdparm -I /dev/sdf | grep -iE "security|frozen|locked"

* Security Mode feature set
Security:
locked
not frozen
not expired: security count
Security level high
1518min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 1518min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.

Unfortunately non of the unlock statements helped. I'm always getting:

Issuing SECURITY_UNLOCK command, password="", user=user
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: f0 00 05 04 53 40 00 0a 00 00 00 00 26 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

[pepe]

are you sure the sanitize process is not resumed when repowered? I guess it should resume once started and you got no access until it is completed.

[skullmonkey]

This was my hope too, but it looks like, it does nothing...

hdparm --sanitize-status /dev/sdf

/dev/sdf:
Issuing SANITIZE_STATUS command
Sanitize status:
State: SD0 Sanitize Idle

Last edited by skullmonkey on November 17th, 2025, 4:45, edited 1 time in total.

[skullmonkey]

General question: A lot of guides still advice to use hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass NULL /dev/sdf to set an empty password. I found some remarks, that parted magic did this by default until around 2014 and then changed it to "password" because of problems. But I couldn't find more details about it.

Maybe I have the same problems with the NULL password now. Can someone explain in more details what happened back then and was there a workaround?

[skullmonkey]

Looks like I have an expensive brick :/ Thanks for all answers.

[SWM]

Unfortunately, I'm not a Linux user.
But I would use "hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass NULL /dev/sdf" on a drive where I can read the password sector with software I have access to. Then I'd see what password is actually set there.
I don't know if HDD understands zero-length passwords.

[fzabkar]

I believe that hdparm sends a 32-byte password to the drive, as required by the ATA standard. It pads the user supplied string with 0x00 bytes if the password is shorter than 32 bytes. In the case of the NULL password, the length is 0, so hdparm pads its with 32 x 0x00 bytes.