Wiping a bricked 7200.11

Hey guys,

Thinking I was safe from the 7200.11 issue since I don't own any seagates, I ignored the problem and alerted any friends who might own one. Unfortunately, my parents bought a new HP desktop earlier this year, and to our horror found out that it had the seagate 7200.11. How did we find out? ... It bricked itself last week.

We should have seen it coming- their computer was uber slow for its whole life, even though its a newer quad core w/ a ton of memory (slower in fact than their old P4 laptop). I just figured it was because they bought an HP with all that crapware, but looks like I was wrong!

Anyhow, HP sent a replacement hard drive, but my parents had alot of financial data on the drive, such as tax returns and brokerage statements. Fearing Seagate will ultimately just replace the controller board and sell it as refurbished (with the financial data still on there), is there a way to wipe the disk now that its bricked?

I taught them good data backup, so nothing was lost, but if we can't wipe this drive I think they are just going to buy a new hard drive and keep the bricked one. $100 for a good drive (1TB WD Black is my recommendation) is worth it to them if it means secure data. I've read that Seagate offers data recovery, but unfortunately because this was out of an HP computer, Seagate support refuses to help, and HP support is easily one of the worst I've ever dealt with.

I've tried a bunch of linux/dos apps like derek's boot and nuke, Active@ KillDisk, etc. Killdisk looked like it was working once, but a few hours later no progress was achieved.

I've been searching for hours upon hours about this, but I've come up with nothing. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I came to a situation like this. I had a WD slowly die and data loss wasn't an issue because I had multiple backups. However, I did have data on there that I wouldn't want going out. All I tried was DBAN to wipe it clean, which didn't work

Well, my story didn't really help since I've come to the same place of uncertainty as you did.

Maybe you can probably run a magnet over it? Not sure if that'd kill the data enough, but maybe they can tell if that's happened and blame it on you?

Drill a couple holes from the top into the platters inside. Sure, you can't RMA the drive anymore but disks are so cheap now days.

Yeah I'm not worried about the security of the drive if we do decide to keep it (I've dreamed many destructive deaths for the drive), but if there was some way to wipe it without destroying it so we could RMA it, it would be nice.

Thanks for the input guys. I looked into a magnet, but from what I've read they aren't reliable in terms of wiping data. I'm not crazy paranoid or anything, but since this problem is so easily remedied by Seagate once they get it back, I'm just not sure that the drive will be wiped prior to them refurbishing it and sending it back out the door.

Isnt there a guide somewhere to unbrick it manually? I think it involved a Nokia data cable or something like that. But I wouldnt really worry too much about Seagate, WD, or another company stealing your data. They go through thousands of defective drives a day in an automated fashion, so the chances are next to none that they will decide to go through your files. However, it is likely that your drive will be refurbished then sent out, but they will wipe it out first.

I think I read something about that method- a bit too involved. My parents don't seem to mind $100 on a new drive, so I think that's the route they'll go. We just don't trust seagate/HP enough to actually wipe the drive, since they handled this situation so poorly.

I'm angry at seagate for making the defect, but most angry at HP for having our contact information for months and never contacting us to tell us we had a computer with a possibly defective hard drive. To think, one stupid email with a firmware update could have avoided this entire mess. Ugh.

I'm not familiar with the details of the Seagate failures, but it sounds like the other wiper software could at least see the drive... Tried a Secure Erase?

I think you are giving Seagate a bit less credit than they deserve if you are honestly afraid that they'd fix it up and send it back out to a customer as a refurb with existing data on it. I have NEVER heard of anyone receiving a refurb drive with a previous customer's data already on the disk.

That said, I'm not sure what steps they take when they do wipe a drive before shipping. Do they simply format it (quick or full)? Do they do a multi-pass wipe? It seems like they would have policies in place to ensure that an event like you're describing would never occur, because it would leave them open to lawsuits if a customer's sensitive data was compromised. I'd like to think that *if* they receive a defective drive via RMA, they make it impossible for someone to receive that drive and simply use an undelete utility to recover files from it. It's been a while since I had to RMA a drive (last one was a Seagate 400GB, heh) and I sold the new drive without even opening it. But I believe it would come unpartitioned and completely blank, just like a new drive, and you'd have to initialize it via Disk Management or another utility.

It would be interesting to know if anyone has ever successfully recovered files off of a refurbished HDD. But I think the chances of that are slim to none, because 99+% of people aren't going to know how to or want to try to do that, and even if they tried I believe Seagate would ensure that it's not possible due to potential legal issues. If I had money to burn, I'd buy a few refurb drives off of the forums and send them to a specialized data recovery service to see if they could find any data on the drives from previous customers.

imyourzero said:

I think you are giving Seagate a bit less credit than they deserve if you are honestly afraid that they'd fix it up and send it back out to a customer as a refurb with existing data on it. I have NEVER heard of anyone receiving a refurb drive with a previous customer's data already on the disk.

Click to expand...

Apple had been providing refurb iPhones with data from the previous users still on them.
http://www.zdziarski.com/

May 16, 2008: Refurbished iPhone Reveals Customer Data
A few days ago, I posted a discovery in that personal data remains intact (in deleted portions of the file system) following a full iPhone restore. As it turns out, Apple themselves may not have been aware of this. Thank goodness, otherwise identity theft might actually be, like, hard. A detective from the Oregon State Police, whom I've verified, notified me this afterrnoon that an out-of-the-box refurbished iPhone he purchased directly from Apple contained recoverable personal data. This included email, personal photos, and even financial information that he was able to recover using my forensic toolkit. Needless to say, the original owner was quite surprised. He informed me that the device had been returned to Apple under a warranty exchange only a few months ago, suggesting that Apple has been using an insecure refurbishing process for the past year.

Click to expand...

A hard drive is a lot less complex than a complete iPhone, but I'd still do it myself if I want to be 100% sure it's done right.

The only time I can think of where the manufacturer would be responsible is if your drive was in a condition that you couldn't wipe it yourself before sending it in, but they repaired it to a usable state. If you send it to the manufacturer with sensitive data on it, it's your own fault (barring drive failure that prevents you from wiping it yourself). I would expect them to at least do some read/write testing on the repaired drive and probably a Secure Erase, but I'm betting there's some fine print in there that says they don't have to do anything at all regarding the remnants of your data.

First, I want to commend your parents for being properly paranoid. Many people don't even bother deleting their stuff when selling their computers. If you're the one who have educated them, mad props to you. I've used DBAN in the past to good effect, but obviously it won't work on a dead drive.

Second, $100 for peace of mind is cheap. Even if you knew Seagate had proper procedures in place to make sure it would get wiped, they could fail somehow. Kill it with fire and be done with it.

If you're up to the task you can try this:
http://www.msfn.org/board/solution-seagate-7200-11-hdds-t128807.html

I've done it multiple times to get data off Seagate drives before RMA'ing them.

Personally I would get another drive then take a drill/hammer to the old one.

Once the drive is experiencing the firmware problem, no, you will not be able to see/access it with anything before it is repaired.

It also doesn't have anything to do with the controller board.

The factory-refurbish technique that is (or is supposed to be) used will wipe the drive, but that's not to say that there isn't some unscrupulous person working at the refurbishment center who saves all the porn-I-mean-data from the drives before refurbing them.