Solved: SSD is in "Frozen State" - can not Secure Erase??

I have a Samsung 840 120Gb - I have secured erased it before.. I loaded windows from my HDD so I could do it from windows, when I opened Samsung Magician (stupid name for useless program) it said there were a firmware update so I updated it, rebooted etc - now I went to secure erase as I want too completely reinstall windows due to issues and I can not as it says "drive is in a frozen state" - ive done it before from this HDD so it seems the update has screwed it or changed it...the drive works, but i cant secure erase it?

heres what ive tried:

1) unpluggin the Sata cable (as per its instructions) = no joy.

2) unpluggin the Sata cable, turning on, loading windows THEN pluggin it in = nothing happens, no drive appears, there appears to be no "hot swap" options in the BIOS of my Gigabyte H77M-D3H motherboard.

3) killing power to the PC and rebooting = no joy.

4) created a USB version to run at boot = mixed results, it said the same thing "drive is frozen - unplug sata cable for 2 seconds then plug back in" and run it by typing seguio.exe - so I did that but typing the instruction done nothing, so I reboot and this time it went further to erase it but it stopped saying FATAL ERROR!! - so I reboot and tried again and it said the drive was frozen again!!

this has to be the stupidest thing ive experienced, I can not "UNFREEZE" the drive following samsungs instructions, ive read that freezing the drive is done by the OS at boot, so how is it detected as frozen without the OS running??? I just dont understand it - this only happened after updating to latest firmware!!! - so now I can not do a clean install!!

can anyone help with this please?

thanks