Question Seagate Barracuda ATA bricked with Seagate tools?

[franco]

I have an old Seagate Barracuda ATA IV ST380021A 80GB Hard Drive that I want to wipe data from. I tried with DBAN but it told me it had experienced non-fatal errors in erasing the data. The hard drive still showed up under device manager so I made a Seagate Tools bootable disc, selected the repair option, and got a message telling me the bad sectors on the drive had been repaired. However, when I tried to find the drive after that point it is nowhere to be found. I am doing this on an old PC that is running XP.

I tried swapping the ribbon and power cables. I then tried putting the hard drive in on its own with no other hard drives connected but none of it works. It does not show up in DBAN or Segate tools. Is there anything that I have done wrong? I also have an old Maxtor hard drive to delete and am at the stage of non-fatal errors in DBAN so don't want to make the same mistake twice.

 

[Ralston18]

What are you planning to do with the old drives?

I would not risk any data at all via either disk. Will likely fail if that has already not happened.

No need for DBAN or other such measures.

My suggestion is to simply take the old HDD's apart. Save the very powerful magnets and responsibly recycle the rest.

The platters can be use as reflectors, mirrors, or in art work.

If there are kids around let them take the drives apart - make it a joint project.

 

[USAFRet]

Unless there is life critical data on this drive, it is a fridge magnet donor.

 

[franco]

I'm not planning on selling the drives. I just wanted the data deleted for my own peace of mind. The exception is a relative's old 16GB hard drive from the late 90s which DBAN done about 7 passes on successfully.

Anyway, in terms of what options I have to resolve this issue I may try a laptop I have been given which is running Windows 10 or 11. I read that recent Windows versions can attempt to recover hard drives. The main issue I see is whether the laptop will be able to see the problem ATA drive if it is connected by USB to SATA cable if my old desktop did not. I guess if it is not recognised by other computers then it really is a brick.