Hello, new problem here.

I have a Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB drive (HD502IJ) and last night I did a secure erase in MHDD to clean it for my friend (the owner). In fact, the process seemed to be finished in 1h 40m (drive dropped the BUSY state), but again the BUSY state was on and since then the process looks like unfinished (3h and counting). I rebooted the machine and now BIOS does not see the drive. In MHDD only the port is listed, no identification (drive does not respond to ID nor EID commands).

What can I do in order to recover the drive? The drive was in good state (SMART was good and there are no reallocated sectors), but I did a secure erase because there was important and private information in it (from a company) and I wanted to have peace of mind (and my friend too).

Thanks again

Problem solved after power cycle the computer. That's all.

And are you sure data was erased ?

It should not work that way.

Why? Is not safe the secure erase method implemented in modern disks? Should I wipe the disk again with the US DoD method or a more aggressive method like Gutmann?

Too long to explain here... Anyway on HUMAN SCALE , security erase is sufficient. Period. The problem is that if SE was not done, the drive should still have been pwd locked.

Ok, but the drive is not locked, it was automatically unlocked after I power cycled the computer. Now the drive is recognized by BIOS and responds to identify commands. I think the process was properly finished.

I've been trying to play with the FASTERASE command to see how much faster it works. However, I have yet to find a drive or system that will allow me to successfully run the PWD and set a password. Is there a secret trick that I'm missing?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

It ALWAYS work here.

Approx. erase times : Maxtor 80 GB like DM9 = about 40-45 minutes, N40P = about 20 minutes, 120 GB like DM9 or Seagate or Hitachi = about 1 hr. , 320 GB (Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung) = about 2 hr.

Luke, I too have had problems only with some drives. BlackST made some comments here on this, errata-mhdd-fasterase-t9867.html.

I've been looking at BlackST's post for the past few days trying to make it work. I've tried on 3 different systems. I've tried with Samsung, Seagate & Western Digital drives. I've tried via SATA and via SATA to IDE adapter. I even tried with an older and newer version of MHDD. None will allow the PWD command to set the password.

It isn't like I need it to work as I can easily get the process going with PC3000. However, now that I know that it doesn't work, I need to find out why it doesn't work.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Sounds strange ...

For me problem was with BIOS sending password freeze. Bypassed this, now able to set pwd with this pc.