Drive will not initialize

I have an old Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB SATA / 150 HDD that crashed on me. I was able to recover the relevant data I needed off the drive, but I wanted to wipe the drive.

I have used DBAN on the drive, once before, but there was an error message pertaining to the boot sector of the drive. I was re-wiping, using a USB-to-ATAPI/ATA adapter, and I unplugged the power cable, not realizing that there was not a battery in the laptop.

Now, DBAN does not recognize the drive, but windows does (management console - hard drives and storage); however, I cannot initialize the drive.

All recovery/MBR re-write software I have used has not made a difference in the visibility of the drive.

My IT guy at work suggested creating a cable to connect usb directly to the eight-pin connector on the drive (Power, Data Transfer, and ground). That way, I will be able to access the Bootloader, re-flash, and then re-initialize and wipe the drive.

Does anybody know what I need to create this connector? He also stated that a kit was sold at Radio Shack, but I figured I could build on my own.

Thank you for your help,

BW78

In disk management can you delete the drive... this will remove your partition... repartition... and you should be able to format it and then nuke it... or just take a hammer to the data and power connections and trash it.

Hammer!