My friend gave me an old Toshiba MK2023GAS 2.5" ide hdd asking for help.

It's not recognizable with PC IDE (2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter is fine), but can be seen with USB enclosure. With M$ Disk Management, it will ask to initialize the disk, ie. create MBR/GPT, both will fail with "cyclic error"! Error scanning it with HD Tune, all errors, also did a full erase with HD Tune (writing 0s to it at 2MB/s), no help!

I check the HDD Unlock from "the" site, but its faq states the locked drive will still be seen in IDE... Now I'm doing low level format on it with Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool (v2.36 build 1181), I hope that will work! Has anyone tried to create MBR and failed with cyclic error? What's your solution?

The low level format doesn't help!

And I try to connect it on another PC, just the same, cannot go past the IDE device listing!!

Go to DOS command line (click on “Start Menu”, then “Run”, type in “cmd” in textbox, and hit “OK”)

* Type in “DiskPart” in command line.
* Type in “list disk” in command line to show all disks in this machine.
* Use “select” to set the focus to the specified partition, for example “select disk 1″.
* Use “clean” command to remove GPT disk from the current in-focus disk by zeroing sectors.

after that the disk should seem unalocated. Reformat into NTFS or whatever u want. Should work.

Or confirm with MHDD that it's not locked with ATA password.

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Bitlevel Data Recovery