My hard drive has gone dark

[asterose]

My hard drive does not show up in diskpart, and when I try to recover, it tells me my hard drive is locked, as though it's still there.  What is going on?  I cannot boot to Windows.  Is there anything, commands in diskpart for instance, I can do to get back my hard drive? 

[Allan]

Download SeaTools for DOS (https://www.seagate.com/support/game-drives/playstation/seatools-dos-master/) , burn it to a cd, boot to it and run a diagnostic on the drive.

[patio]

A locked  HDD is a paperwight... unless you know the password or the method used to lock it yer outta luck...no matter waht tool you run on it.

[DaveLembke]

Did you get this computer second hand? Problems like this seem to arise when people get computers that weren't originally theirs that the original owner had a lock on them and the new owner doesn't know the unlock key. I feel you will just have to buy a new hard drive for the computer and swap it out and start with a fresh clean install. If the data on the drive is yours and you need it back, you could send it out to a data recovery center that might be able to recover it for you for a fee, however I believe they need to have proof that your the original owner of the drive possibly by a match to proof of purchase of the original computer that the drive came out of to avoid unlocking sensitive data to someone who isn't the original owner.

I have heard that the lock is a stripe of data on the platter as well as other drives its a lock in the PCB that is the drive controller attached to the hard drive, so some drives are easier for a data recovery service to recover the data from than others.

But I haven't had to use their services before, and have only read and heard about what they can do as well as there are some videos online that they show their process that they do to recover data. So saying this all on just what I have read about it and heard.

*If the drive is locked and also encrypted then you might as well toss it into the trash can and install a new drive because encrypted data on a drive is worthless without the key to unlock it.