MHDD detects drive, hangs on further commands

[kctopitz]

I have a Hitachi HTS721060G9SA00 (60GB 7200RPM 2.5" SATA) pulled from a Thinkpad T60. I've used MHDD over 100 drive wipes and never had a problem like this.

BIOS is in legacy mode (not AHCI). I'm having the same problem on both the original Thinkpad and on a Dell Desktop.

The problem: MHDD will boot and the drive shows up when asked to select a drive controller. I select the drive and get the MHDD prompt. From there, if I hit F2 to detect the drive parameters, or "erase" to try to wipe the drive, MHDD simply hangs and the BUSY indicator at the top of MHDD stays lit.

What I've already tried: I disabled the recovery partition in the T60's BIOS, deleted all partitions, zero'd out the drive using DBAN, did a surface scan with HDTUNE which came up fine. I did notice that in HDTUNE, nothing showed up on the SMART report tab -- similar to what you'd see if the drive was connected via USB (but this was with SATA, of course). I'm suspecting that there's a link here. I tested the drive using the T60's built-in drive diagnostic function in the BIOS as well for good measure. I've tried multiple versions of the MHDD ISO, from my own custom one to a freshly downloaded copy of the original. All of them freeze as soon as I try to detect or erase the drive.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? Anyone have an idea?

Many thanks.

[kctopitz]

Follow up: I solved my own problem, and thought I'd share this info here in case anyone else runs into this problem in the future.

After booting and selecting the hard drive in question, I ran the CONFIG command. Using this, you're presented with the option to turn certain features off. I did the following:

- switched SECURITY support off
- switched AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) support off
- switched HPA (Host Protected Area) off

I'm guessing it was either SECURITY or HPA which was causing the problem, so if you're having a similar problem, I would try those first.

Once those features were turned off I was able to detect the drive parameters as usual and run ERASE and SCAN without problem.