Five weeks later:I'd hate for somebody else to make the same mistake I had made recently when formatting his or her hard drive.
Do NOT makes this mistake:
Do not ignore the written warning from our accessory called Disks by prematurely aborting a secure format on a hard drive. In my case, my internal hard drive only needed approximately one more hour to finish formatting, but I ignored the written warning from Disks and terminated the secure format prematurely. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me at the time, many Japanese laptop manufacturers have a HDD/SDD password wired into their hard drives. And if you don't know that particular password, the laptop will not boot --period!
So, with my hard drive attached externally, I spent many unfruitful weeks working with Darik's Boot And Nuke trying to bust through a Toshiba hard drive block. I would spend 10 days with Darik's formatting tool (which would be running 24/7) only to find after getting two thirds though a formatting option, that the format itself would be unable to continue. I tried many formatting options many times, called Toshiba twice, tried time and time again to use a trick I learned on YouTube, but all to no avail. I finally just had to say the hell with it.
One more time:
Do not ignore the written warning from our accessory called Disks by prematurely aborting a secure format on a hard drive. Heeding this advice may help save somebody here lots and lots of unnecessary grief and even a little bit of money.
