Hi,

I have a 40Gb seagate IDE disk drive , a barracuda IV. I'mnot sure exactly what has been done to this disk in the past BUT I can run seatools and it passes both the short and long tests fine.No SMART settings have been tripped. However I cannot appear to format it.

BIOS recognises it OK but windows or Mac do not see the disk in Management/Storage or disk utility.

When I ran seatoolsone thing I noticed was that it said 'security mode supported and enabled'. I don't want to try to recover data, I just want to get the diskwiped and back to usable. The seagate disk installationtool fails with an error.I wonder if the MBR or something has been removed ?

Any suggestions if there are toolsto reset this back to a working drive or is it now a paper weight?


Thanks

The drive is what? Four years old? Five?
Old drives can fail and still look good because it is the first four sectors of the magnetic material on the magnetic plates that bubble up and are thrown off form the centrifugal fource of the spinning drive. If they are gone, it will not boot and will often show as good.
S.M.A.R.T. test shows good?
Any other drives installed?
Does it use an 80 conductor 40 connector EIDE cable or a 40 conductor?
Jumper set to master, not cable select?

Thanks. I have tried cable select, and usingthe jumpersto indicate master/slave using an 80conductor cable that is known to be OK.

SMART tests are all OK, and the long read test in seatools passes fine on repeated runs. I'm intrigued by this security mode enabled.Onother disks this is supported and disabled. I'm wondering if this disk has somehow been set to a read-only orencrypted mode ?

Old enough to have failed. Used frequently enough to have failed. Symptoms are those of a failed drive.
S.M.A.R.T. Tests have a 10 percent error rate.
"Security mode enabled" has little to do with anything... rare, really.
Set "read-only or encrypted mode" how and by whom..
Look for the obvious, because that is nearly always what has actually occurred.