I have a seagate ST320LT007 - 9ZV142 hard drive from a Dell laptop. The Laptop was locked so the the drive was replaced.

 

I bought a 2.5" USB external case so I could mount the drive, which I thought I could just connected to my PC and format it.

 

The problem I have is it is recognized in device mangager, but I cannot access it even though it shows up in computer/disk management.

 

Any ideas or is the drived destined for the bin?

 

Cheers

 

Vijay

Using the drive manager see if it shows in there.

 

Delete the partition and recreate it then format.

It shows up in disk manager as "not initialized" but if I try an initialize it, it says "the device is not ready"

if you know somebody with a 'mac' they maybe able to do it through disk manager but i don't think a windows pc will allow you to do it through standard disk management, you may get around it with a 3rd party disk management program

Windows isn't very flexible when it comes to formatting disk drives. If you're brave enough, what I would do is boot a Linux live CD just for the partition step, wipe it and create a filesystem that Windows can use (NTFS I presume).

 

Then again it depends how exactly it's "locked".

It's locked with a dell password. Even if I try and boot to a cd, it tells me the hard drive is locked and needs a password.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

if you know somebody with a 'mac' they maybe able to do it through disk manager but i don't think a windows pc will allow you to do it through standard disk management, you may get around it with a 3rd party disk management program

 

My friend has a Mac but I've no idea where to find the disk manager on it?

on a mac on the main finder window, it's go>utilities>disk utility

a friend of mine had a locked drive with all his music on it that he couldn't access after changing computers, i got straight into on my mac and copied his stuff over then reformatted the drive for him

Cheers, I'll go see her over the weekend :)

Look for a program called "easyRecovery Professional" by a company called "ontrack". When I ran my PC repair shop out in China I had many people come to me with "dead" HDs. The program is designed to grab lost data even after a format, its amazing what you think is gone forever, I was finding stuff on HDs 4 years after they had been deleted. The reason I bring it up is because in the Utilities section, there are tools for re-formatting, repairing sectors and partitions. It should help you out and solve all your problems...

on a mac on the main finder window, it's go>utilities>disk utility

a friend of mine had a locked drive with all his music on it that he couldn't access after changing computers, i got straight into on my mac and copied his stuff over then reformatted the drive for him

 

Sadly that didn't work. It could see the drive but said it couldn't access the last block

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Look for a program called "easyRecovery Professional" by a company called "ontrack". When I ran my PC repair shop out in China I had many people come to me with "dead" HDs. The program is designed to grab lost data even after a format, its amazing what you think is gone forever, I was finding stuff on HDs 4 years after they had been deleted. The reason I bring it up is because in the Utilities section, there are tools for re-formatting, repairing sectors and partitions. It should help you out and solve all your problems...

 

I will have a search for it. Thanks you :)

Tried easyrecover with no luck, it says it can't access the drive operating system due to security reasons. I can only assume it's cos of this damn Dell password :(