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I have received an ATA SSD drive which was secure erased before being handed over.

When it was secure erased (using the "Disk Eraser" tool on Parted Magic LiveCD), the default NULL password was entered into the GUI. However, no password was set before this was done and the machine can no longer see the disk.

It looks like they missed the step where they should set the password first before sending the ATA erase signal.

Is there any way back from this? Or is the disk bricked forever?

Richard
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Strange, I've done this several times without such outcome.

hdparm --security-help
hdparm --security-set-pass NULL /dev/my_ssd
hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/my_ssd

Usually they drop their data instantly and then are working as a new devices. And hdparm will refuse to send erase command without setting NULL or any password first.

Do you actually see your SSD in /dev/sd*? Do you see it in BIOS? If it's not seen in BIOS I'm afraid you will not be able to do anything with it.

Dmitry Ilyin
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If the system doesn't see the drive there is nothing you can do via software to recover the drive as the drive no longer wants to talk to the OS, possibly because you've triggered some bug in its firmware and the drive now can't fully boot.

In theory there could be a way by accessing the internal serial port of the drive, which was used in the past to recover a hard drive from a bug in its firmware. In reality, I doubt you'd find the documentation about how to talk to the drive over that port, which commands to send, etc. Just buy a new drive, and possibly get in touch with the manufacturer to report the bug.

André Borie
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  • I'd also double check the following the manufacturer's utilities (i.e. bootable firmware upgrade or recovery utility) to see if any of them see it, and also the warranty on the drive. Perhaps you'll get lucky and they'll replace it. – tfrederick74656 Jun 26 '16 at 03:17