Unallocated External Drive - Drive most likely toast - data recovery/total erasure questions

[jesscd]

I have a DWC130 3TB Toshiba External drive. I was using it as a backup drive. After only a few weeks (with it working perfectly fine) I plugged it in one day for it to be no longer recognized in Windows Explorer. In Data Management it shows up as unallocated with all right click options greyed out.

Through this forum, I pretty much have tried every suggestion to access the data, to no avail.

Toshiba customer service was completely useless - basically telling me that I could send it in and for about $1000 they would try to recover the data. Fortunately two things are good - I had double backups, so I did not lose any data. Also, the drive is still under warranty, so I can recover my losses there.

My problem is that before returning the drive, I want to make sure that none of the data can be recovered. There are pics of my children, budget information, and other documentation that I really want to make sure are wiped off of this drive.

I can not seem to format the drive. It is saying it is write protected. I have tried all the suggestions I could find googling this problem, and they have not worked. I have tried utilizing kill disk and and darik's boot and nuke. Neither will work.

Any suggestions? If I can't access data or format - should I even worry about data on the drive?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

The only solution is physical destruction by dropping from 10 feet or more on to solid concrete several times, attacking it with a heavyweight hammer, puncturing the case with hammer and screwdriver, and destroying the cable connector ports for good measure.

Of course, that means foregoing the warranty.

 

[jesscd]

The only solution is physical destruction by dropping from 10 feet or more on to solid concrete several times, attacking it with a heavyweight hammer, puncturing the case with hammer and screwdriver, and destroying the cable connector ports for good measure.

Of course, that means foregoing the warranty.

 

[jesscd]

Haha - I kind of already figured out that one. I was hoping for some type of miracle software program or something?

 

[EileenC]

You can do what's called degaussing the hard drive. I have an IT consulting company and here's how I do it for my customers: I took apart two big stereo speakers and got the magnets out. These are usually huge and extremely powerful. I stuck the hard drive between them and left it overnight. Even better results - move the drive and magnets around every few hours. If you try to attach the drive after this it won't even know it's a drive anymore, you will get the msg "This drive has never been formatted", it blows away the file allocation table and everything.