Hard Drive Un-Lock

I know someone who replaced a hard drive in one of those Cable/Satellite Provider Video Recorder Devices. He wants to use the hard drive that he took out as a file backup drive for his Windows PC. However, he says that the hard drive is locked. He tried formatting it with Windows, but it won’t format.

I gave him a Partition Wizard bootable CD. He says that the Partition Wizard bootable CD shows the drive, but it is “grayed” out with no options available to do anything with it.

How would you go about un-locking this hard drive for use on a Windows PC?

Thanks in Advance.

 

what brand/model hd?

 

You can try HDD LLFormat to zero out the drive if it detects it. The bootable version of Active@killdisk might see it. Also, try installing the windows home edition of Partition Wizard. That may work. Another option would be GParted Live CD.

http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-LLF-Low-Level-Format-Tool/

If the drive is SATA, you can use use Gparted Live CD to zero out the drive. At about 2:35 in it will explain about unlocking the drive. I am not sure if this pertains to the locked drive of your friend but it is worth a shot.

Code:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpZwTaOHdT4

 

I remember telling him to try GParted (Parted Magic bootable CD), but I don't think that he did. I plan to make a Terabyte Copy/Wipe bootable CD for him and see if that will work.

 

He showed me the hard drive, but I forgot to write down the Model Name. It is a Western Digital External 2.5" Hard Drive (WDBACX0010BKK-01). I could not find this Model Number on Western Digital's website. I found a similar looking hard drive with Model Numbers starting with WDBACY.........

 

That number references an external passport drive.

http://wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=879&language=1

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/AAG/ENG/4178-705135.pdf

 

I decided to stop going back and forth giving instructions to him on what to try. I picked up the hard drive from him and will check it out tonight.

 

I don't see what was "locked". There were three (3) Linux Partitions.

I just deleted each of the Linux Partitions along with their boot sectors. I then made one single NTFS Partition and did a quick format.

I used BootIt Bare Metal 1.08 for the above work.