[URGENT] Inturrupted Secure Erase On 10 1TB HDDs, NONE Of Them Show Up! HELP

[iamdarkyoshi]

So we have a HDD formatting machine at work, and we've tried both DBan and Secure Erase through Ubuntu.

Dban freaks out if one drive is going nuts, but it only does so after everything else is done, with no indication to which drives passed or failed.

 

So we tried secure erase, which works nice, but ubuntu's utility craps out after one drive fails to start, and then we rebooted the machine.

 

None of the drives show up.

 

Ok we thought, maybe they are still excecuting their secure erase function, we'll leave the machine powered on overnight

 

Next day, none of the drives show up.

 

 

EDIT: THE BIOS SEES THE DRIVES, BUT THE HP MACHINE HOSTING THEM BELIEVES THEY ARE DRIVELOCKED.

 

Wtf is going on? I know some of the drives are WD drives, @Captain_WD Any ideas?

 

We needed to sell this lot of ten today...

[manikyath]

guessing thats some old ones you harvested? in honesty it sounds like they need the hammer.

[Levent]

have you tried them on a different device?

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

guessing thats some old ones you harvested? in honesty it sounds like they need the hammer.

They all worked pefectly fine before this

[iamdarkyoshi]

5 minutes ago, Levent said:

have you tried them on a different device?

Yup.

[iamdarkyoshi]

Added more info above.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Added more info above.

I thought Captain WD is gone

[iamdarkyoshi]

2 minutes ago, deXxterlab97 said:

I thought Captain WD is gone

Dammit he is!

[spellmanuk]

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm have you tried kill disk? 

[jj9987]

If it is a Linux machine, then 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[x] bs=8M

and it will completely zero the hard drive. Replace x with whatever letter the drive has (check from lsblk for example). No weird third-party app needed.

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, peej said:

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm have you tried kill disk? 

Yeah it breaks when a drive derps out as well and wasn't as fast as secure erase

[manikyath]

22 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

They all worked pefectly fine before this

that extra info is certainly interesting...

 

do you have a non-HP computer around to try it with?

[iamdarkyoshi]

4 minutes ago, manikyath said:

that extra info is certainly interesting...

 

do you have a non-HP computer around to try it with?

What would you like me to try? I'm surrounded by PCs

[iamdarkyoshi]

@Boogieman_WD is the new captain wd apparently.

 

Halp?

[Falconevo]

Are you running the disks in AHCI/passthrough mode or are they obfuscated behind a RAID controller passing them off as SCSI devices?

I would be putting a single drive at a time on a AHCI Passthrough controller and secure erasing them one at a time.

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, Falconevo said:

Are you running the disks in AHCI/passthrough mode or are they obfuscated behind a RAID controller passing them off as SCSI devices?

I would be putting a single drive at a time on a AHCI Passthrough controller and secure erasing them one at a time.

Some are on a RAID controller, some are on cheap PCIE sata cards, and some on the internal controller

[Falconevo]

Single disk at a time on the internal SATA controller, remove all other controllers and retry with secure erase make sure the internal SATA controller is set to AHCI while you do it.  Should prevent any unwanted drama from software RAID

[Straxxus]

18 minutes ago, Falconevo said:

Single disk at a time on the internal SATA controller, remove all other controllers and retry with secure erase make sure the internal SATA controller is set to AHCI while you do it.  Should prevent any unwanted drama from software RAID

Hi, I'm @iamdarkyoshi s co-worker, who is currently working on this issue. I've change into ahci mode and booted into an ultimate boot CD environment, I was able to use the ATA password tool to unlock a Toshiba drive with its master password of 32 spaces. However, the master ATA passwords for the Samsung/Seagate drives seem to be something different. I've tried to run secure erase, but get prompted for a password when I try to run. If I could find the master passwords for the other drives, that would solve the issue.

 

Drives are either Samsung/Seagate momentus ST640LM001 or ST1000LM024

 

I've tried both "Seagate" with 25 spaces, and 32 "t" as per a website I found with some master passwords on it. Neither work on any drives

[Falconevo]

Tried 32 blank spaces for the unlock?  There aren't that many master passwords, I doubt they would differ between model either.  Usually chosen by manufacturer and they generally keep the same passcode

*EDIT* you can attempt to flash the drive firmware back to stock, that may get you further.  I think there are some tools available.  I seem to recall coming across a site with the .exe's on.

[Straxxus]

2 hours ago, Falconevo said:

Tried 32 blank spaces for the unlock?  There aren't that many master passwords, I doubt they would differ between model either.  Usually chosen by manufacturer and they generally keep the same passcode

*EDIT* you can attempt to flash the drive firmware back to stock, that may get you further.  I think there are some tools available.  I seem to recall coming across a site with the .exe's on.

I'll attempt a reflash, tried 32 spaces on every drive, hasn't worked so far

 

Update: can't flash firmware because there aren't any updates for these drives. Does Seagate have a support email or something? Maybe they would know the ATA master password

[vanished]

4 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

They all worked pefectly fine before this

That doesn't mean the load of doing this didn't kill them.  Though it would be a little odd for 10 to all go at the same time....

[Straxxus]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

That doesn't mean the load of doing this didn't kill them.  Though it would be a little odd for 10 to all go at the same time....

All drives "work" but are locked. They all show up in BIOS as well as in Ubuntu; however nothing can be done with them due to security.

[Falconevo]

6 hours ago, Straxxus said:

I'll attempt a reflash, tried 32 spaces on every drive, hasn't worked so far

 

Update: can't flash firmware because there aren't any updates for these drives. Does Seagate have a support email or something? Maybe they would know the ATA master password

Export the firmware from a working drive and then re-flash the non functional drives with that backup.  Vendor should have some tools to backup the current firmware on the drives.

[vrod]

Did you try to run a health test on one of them on e.g. Hdtune? Secure erase shouldn't do anything else than... erase data. I have never experienced firmware failure due to abortion of a drive erase. 10 drives at the same time is a bit but if a lot of them already had many reallocated sectors and hasn't been erased before, it could have caused some issues. It's seagate afterall.. not the most reliable stuff.

[Deep Fried Mars Bar]

You could try to brute force the password. or buy a seagate hdd unlock tool (see if they lived at least)