Most newer drives just ignore this AT-A command.

unfortunately its an older drive.

Can't you use spinrite to recover the hdd failure?

What exactly do ya mean by recover? The old data?

So Its a SCSI hard drive

Adaptec host card.

I dont want to recover the data at all. I want to get the Hard disk back to a useable state.

It failed half way through a low level format.

And now when I go to the adaptec scsi utility via ctrl-a when the PC is booting ....it detects the drive fine but when I select it I see a bunch of ascii characters and the pc crashes - Its messed up.

How do I recover the drive so its useable.

I tried spinrite 6 but it will not detect the drive.

Maybe you can try mhdd.
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

I used it to remove the xbox passwords, work just fine.
Has a lowlevel format mode if i recall correctly.

sorry janoz.

none of the programs mentioned worked.

Can you boot with it as a secondary drive and remove its master boot record with MBR wizard, then start from scratch, maybe? I wonder why it failed...

can you try:disk boot and nuke and zero the drive afterwards, i had some messed up ide drives before because of linux and the zeroing was making it reappear ok afterwards.
Also tried hdd regenerator, i used it before spinrite to regenerate the hdd corrupted sector and is somewhat less picky about the hdd controllers.
Also maybe try the very old norton utilities calibrate.exe

btw what disk model and size are we talking about?

or different scsi controller and use that low level.

not familiar with the terms nuke and zero 😜

I mean you try and use dban.iso on a cd to boot from and run rhe data shredder .
You can also try to zero fill the harddisk seeif that works something.