HDD Secure Wipe Failed [Solved]

Hardware Hub Storage
1

I have a old WD 500GB (WD5001AALS) that I was going to wipe in throw in a PC for my parents. I booted up a PC with parted magic and ran the secure wipe tool on it. About 70% though the process the PC froze. When I booted it back up the hard drive appears on the system but its unresponsive. You can't create partitions or partition tables. I also tried re-running the secure wipe and it fails to start. Running the extended SMART test now...

If a drive fails to complete a secure wipe will it lock or is this drive just busted?

2

probably busted

3

Finally got it working. Apparently a password is set and the drive locked as part of the secure erase process. I guess because the PC froze before it finished it never got unlocked.

This site had some great info about using hdparm in parted magic. In my case the disk wiper program set the user password to "password" duh....

https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe_drives_hdparm.html