Ok FINALLY ! I downloaded a particular boot cd and I slaved the toshiba drive in my desktop and booted to the cd and it is now being wiped. Night Hawk you are awesome can't thank you enough for your help...... once it finishes I will mark this thread as solved.
When you come back to mark it solved can you also post the software used? I don't think I've seen any software named in the thread that'll do it if it's set to max security.
Last edited by F5ing; 13 Aug 2012 at 00:59.
Well I've been given the ok to post that I used Dariks Boot & Nuke. It tried to work but the HDD wiping would of literally taken days to complete. Its not a priority to get these workin so I'm movin on to something else. Thank you so much guys for your help, yal def deserve some rep.
You might try a quick check of the SMART status. I'm not sure if security level will interfere but it only should take a few minutes to see. I don't remember if the Toshiba tool shows SMART but it's brand specific. WD shows SMART and you can click on the status to show details. You might see what the reallocated sectors count is.
http://storage.toshiba.com/storage-services-support/warranty-support/software-utilities
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=601&sid=3&lang=en
I almost want to say that boot cd had a hdd smart view/health status. I remember doing something like that and said HDD is locked. I could be thinking of something else I did with that program so don't quote me.
I'm not sure which boot CD you used, but quite a few of them have HDD diagnostics on them so you may well have already given it a shot. And it could be that reading of SMART data was blocked by disk lock. I don't know. But now that you have started a run or two with DBAN it may've changed something to where now it might be able read it.
Have you tried Eraser at all? I wasn't sute how far you would get with it. That zeros drives out by overwriting everything with random data patterns.
Besides a drive partitioning program you boot with live as mentioned earlier the Acronis DriveCleaner is security tool option found in both the retail and free versions provided by WD and Seagate's being rebranded under Disk Wizard.
Quote