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Locked Hard drive

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Max47

Member
Joined
Jan 5, 2004
Location
Indiana, US
Just to start off I am not sure if this violates any rules of the forums asking about this, it seems a bit of a grey area.. If it does, please just delete it, as I value my membership here.

But the situation is; A guy I work with was talking about his laptop that he has had for a few years and forgot the bios password.. Well I told him I could get the bios password off of it for him, which I have succeeded to do. But when I booted it back up it asked for Built-in HDD1 password.. I asked him the next day if he had a hard drive password on it, he said he never put one on there to his knowledge. So I am thinking maybe when he set the bios password it set it for the hard drive as well or something?! I dont really know, but this thing is giving me a real hard time trying to unlock it.. I have done alot of research on the web and cant find alot other than dead ends.. I have found one thing that may work which is a program called HDD-Unlock.. Which also ended up being a dead end for me since it won't execute on win7 64x and thats all I have to boot this hard drive with. Win7 recognizes the drive but will not assign a letter drive or gain access to the drive. I figured I would ask here since I know u guys are the best of the best when it comes to tech advice. Thanks for the help!
 
If it's a WD drive the western digital tools can lock and unlock drives.
 
Sorry, forgot to mention what it was..

Its a 160gig toshiba.. it has abunch of #'s my first guess on model would be HDD2D92BUK01 possibly MK164GSX... The HDD... has a barcode with it under the serial #
 
The Toshiba Master Password (for hard disk locks) is 32 spaces. Fire up the laptop, get to the password input screen, and hit your space bar 32 times. I doubt this will actually work but it's worth a shot.

It is unfortunately not possible to unlock the drive without a either the user password or the master password. Hard disk locking is part of ATA spec, it's not going to be cracked with some freeware utility. Utilities that advertise "unlocking through the use of advanced algorithms" or whatever the hell are really just trying to unlock the disk with the manufacturer's default master password.

To give you an idea of how hard it is without a password - the Xbox hard disk password scheme wasn't cracked until some guy with a logic analyzer read his hard disk's key straight off the PCI bus.

Some info can be found here:

http://www.rockbox.org/lock.html

This might help:

A disk always has two passwords: A User password and a Master password. Most disks support a Master Password Revision Code, which can tell you if the Master password has been changed, or it it still the factory default. The revision code is word 92 in the IDENTIFY response. A value of 0xFFFE means the Master password is unchanged.

Note that attempting to unlock the drive with the master password may result in the drive wiping itself, but at least it'll be usable.

I think your best bet is to let the guy guess every password he can remember.
 
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