Just to report a problem I have had with a second hand drive (Seagate) I
bought on eBay. It was supposedly wiped clean.
The drive seemed to work but everything I tried to gain access responded
'locked' or 'you don't have permission' or similar. Seagate tools and
Acronis True Image would not recognise it, ( I thought I would make a
clone) neither would Gparted, XP disc Manager or Norton Partition image
get any access. The format was unrecognisable. Nothing I tried would do
a reformat. I tried the 'cmd' line 'format' in XP and got the same
result . I thought I had bought a dummy, £6 down the drain! My last
resort was a fundamental 'fdisk' command in root terminal, voila, all
singing and dancing. Later Gparted did all the necessary
re-partitioning I wanted. I suspect the drive came from 'other' non PC
equipment and the wipe did not remove the hidden (boot) sector.