hard drive issues

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grako122

n00b
Joined
Sep 11, 2007
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4
Hi,

A few months ago I bought a Maxtor Personal Storage 500gb (seagate 7200.10 [recently unmounted it from the external case to test it over the ide port]) which worked great until a few weeks ago.
Suddenly, nothing worked anymore. The computer recognized the hard drive properly, but I wasn't able to acces the drive at all.
I tried alot, including a bunch of repair programs, but nothing worked.
I finally used the seatools program which told me that the drive is security locked (max.).

So, my question is: What can I do? or is there something I can do?
I do not want to spend money on it... so I hope there is a free conclusion.

Thank you in advance!

ps.: i'm german... so I hope i wrote it all right... it's the same text i wrote to the seagate support mail adress... but so far I didn't get any answer
 
The hard drives embedded firmware includes routines to password protect itself.
The password data is stored on the drive and cannot be retrieved or changed unless the drive can be unlocked.

Setting the hard drive password is the kind of attack possible by a virus.
I havent heard of it happening before and actually being a virus but its hard to prove as the disk becomes unusable unless the password is known.

I havent been able to find much good news on this other than at least one data recovery company can recover your data but thats expensive.

There is another hope as someone has developed a CD you can boot from that should be able to unlock your drive so you can copy the data off.
If you dont mind booting off a CD before it boots your OS, you can keep using this method.
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/05/08/172/#kasten3

One good thing, hardly anyone can get at the data on that drive unless they are clued up, rich or have your CD disk.
 
Thank you for the quick answer, Nenu!
But I already tried this cd and it asks me for a password. I tried 3 ones I found in a forum somewhere, but they were all wrong and as far as i know i only have 5 tries...

I have to say that I do not care about the data stored on the drive... i just want to get the drive working again.

I have read that it is possible to just update the firmware and bypass the security thing that way..
but due to the fact that i didn't find any firmwares for my drive (st3500630a) i couldn't try that...
 
I suppose the only thing left is to contact Maxtor and see if they will help.
 
thats brilliant!
They do a bad job of marketing it, I didnt find mention of it anywhere.
 
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