45GIG HD WD help

i got a 45 gig WD HD outta a ultimate tv unit. the hard disk however has some kind of lock command and i cant access it. does anyone have any info on how to access the drive??

Oh, you're gonna have fun with this one. The XBox does the same thing. Gimme a few minutes to look for the info.

Okay, here we go.

http://www.xbox-news.co.uk/extracting_pass.htm - Requires a logic analyzer
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Q_20517922.html - Closer to what you need
http://www.eio.com/public/harddrv/0502.html

I think those links work, but my ISP is being a *****.

ThePerfectCore said:

Oh, you're gonna have fun with this one. The XBox does the same thing. Gimme a few minutes to look for the info.

Click to expand...

thanks bro.

Have fun.

nothing. nut thanks anyway. anyone else??

bump.

If it uses a true HDD lock password, the only way to get rid of it is to actually send it to Canada or England, as the software to crack it is illegal here. The problem is that the password is stored in the firmware ROM and the drive won't even spin up without the code. You wouldn't believe how many thousands of GB of drives our parts crib has had to throw away because someone forgot to get rid of the PW before turning it back in.

http://rockbox.haxx.se/lock.html

There's something that describes using a program called ATAPWD. Depending on how the hard disk is locked, it might be able to crack it open, but I think it'll end up wiping the drive.

In Maximum security mode, you cannot unlock the disk! The only way to get the disk back to a usable state is to issue the SECURITY ERASE PREPARE command, immediately followed by SECURITY ERASE UNIT. The SECURITY ERASE UNIT command requires the Master password and will completely erase all data on the disk. The operation is rather slow, expect half an hour or more for big disks.

Click to expand...

So now it's just down to finding the master password...

Another way of doing this, I dunno if you've tried this already, is doing the disk swap thing. If your Ultimate TV unit still works, plug in the hard disk and turn it on, disconnect the IDE cable, and plug the hard disk into your PC. From there you can access the disk. Dunno if you can unlock permanently, though.

After searching for a few minutes, it seems the only way to unlock the hard disk permanently is to either buy some $100 software that might not work, or send it to a data recovery lab (which still might not work).

Still, here's a few more links:

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/q22000/gee2000918002375.htm
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Q_20423260.html