Hard Drive Lock

[mason]

I have a laptop from a client with a Hard Drive Lock. Emachine (Acer) Laptop with Hitachi Hard Drive 160GB Hard Drive.

Can go in to the bios with no problems at all. I can boot from cd with no problems but when i try and use the hard drive it comes up with a hard drive lock.

Quick fix = New hard drive and reinstall

Anyone have any software that i can boot up from and remove the hard drive password or should i offer the customer a new hdd with reinstall.

The setting in the bios that lets you change the hard drive password is asking for the hard drive password to reset the password which the client doesnt have.

Anyone have any help

Thank you
Dave

[kisk]

Only info I could find would be to use HDAT2:

At the dos cmd prompt, try:

hdat2 /w

then:

{select drive}
Commands Menu
SATA Commands
Reset SATA Log 11h
Yes

Never tried this personally with a Hitachi

[kisk]

If the password is being controlled by the bios, simply force flash the bios and that should clear anything saved.

[OzzyGeek]

http://www.hddunlock.com/ it has worked for me.

[300DDR]

It sounds like the drive itself is password protected. HDDunlock doesn't seem to support hitachi. We may be able to unlock it depending on the model, but doesn't sound like it would be worth $300.

[iisjman07]

You can try to unlock the drive with MHDD and using the master password of 32 spaces, apparently it works for some models.