The thread that continues to help! I managed to unlock my drive following the instructions in #11 by King.
I took my harddrive out of the machine, booted using parted magic. Then, once that was booted, I hooked the harddrive (SATA) up to a "SATA/IDE to USB Adapter", plugged it in, and then opened up the Xterm in parted magic (bottom left corner, it's in one of the menus at the bottom; I can't remember which one). Then I just typed in the commands as listed in #11. I had read elsewhere that if you mount the harddrive after POST, the drive doesn't get locked. I know a bit about computers, but this is a bit beyond me, but thanks to google & various discussions, especially this one, I was able to unlock the drive!
I also read a discussion somewhere in which someone stated that using an old version of parted magic which tells you to use "NULL" for the password is the problem. I'm not sure if this is the case, but I was using an old version of parted magic (didn't realize this would be a problem). It's probably worth paying the $5 to get the current version, especially if this would have saved me several hours of trying to figure out how to unlock the hard drive!
I took my harddrive out of the machine, booted using parted magic. Then, once that was booted, I hooked the harddrive (SATA) up to a "SATA/IDE to USB Adapter", plugged it in, and then opened up the Xterm in parted magic (bottom left corner, it's in one of the menus at the bottom; I can't remember which one). Then I just typed in the commands as listed in #11. I had read elsewhere that if you mount the harddrive after POST, the drive doesn't get locked. I know a bit about computers, but this is a bit beyond me, but thanks to google & various discussions, especially this one, I was able to unlock the drive!
I also read a discussion somewhere in which someone stated that using an old version of parted magic which tells you to use "NULL" for the password is the problem. I'm not sure if this is the case, but I was using an old version of parted magic (didn't realize this would be a problem). It's probably worth paying the $5 to get the current version, especially if this would have saved me several hours of trying to figure out how to unlock the hard drive!