Help with laptop drive

Hi all. I was recently asked to look at an IBM Travelstar 48 gig laptop drive that came out of a Dell. Both the laptop and drive were password protected and we are trying to figure out how to unprotect the hard drive. The laptop was purchased legally and there was no impropriety involved, but the seller did not provide the necessary passwords. Any help on the hard drive would be great. I have used IBM/Hitachi's software to try to write zeros to the drive, but for some reason the password won't allow the drive to be accessed. Thanks for all the help in advance.

the hard drive itself is protected? dang, that's pretty cool. Oh sorry, hope ya get it to work.

How can the hard drive be passworded? Encrypted NTFS? You should be able to write zeros out to it. There's nothing I've ever heard of below the OS level to stop you from using a drive like that.

Boot of a Linux cd and use dd to write zeros out to it: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

The FW of the drive contains a password that prevents the drive from spinning up or even being recognized by the BIOS for security purposes. Linux won't work either, but very good thought. Unfortunately, these passwords cannot be broken in the states. The software to crack the password is illegal here. I've heard of services being available in both Canada and the UK that can remove the password at costs between 100 and 150. If there's any chance of contacting the owner, that's your best bet.

Thanks to all who replied. I still have not figured out a way past the protection. I did many a web search and got ideas from launching the hard drive at near light speeds to freezing it for several hours to taking off the controller board and trying to find the chip that controls the password. I think I'll keep it in the freezer for another few days. Thanks again

Replacing the controller board might work. Here is IBM's solution to clearing it:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docvie...1PSMS-3PWHTZ&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&cc=us&lang=en

and here's a site that offers clearing service, but it'd be cheaper to replace:

http://www.1stdatarecovery.com/

Thats fairly meaty password protection


How did you get this laptop again? Second hand? Technically, you should be able to return the laptop if the seller doesn't provide you with the appropriate passwords.

Would it be possible to get a converter, to allow you to plug the hard drive into a desktop computer?

Unfortunately, since the password is built into the firmware of the drive, the drive will not spin up or be configured properly by BIOS until the password is entered. It's very good for data security considering the ease and prevalence of theft for laptops.

A lifelong friend and I do some consulting work for a local computer shop when their tech cannot figure it out. This laptop was one of those projects.
I bought a converter for a desktop system and used it on the laptop drive. My bios does recognize the drive, but I cannot get past there. Currently, a new 48 Gb drive is about $240 or so and I hoped to get this working, but not so far, and it looks bleak right now.
I have not been able to find a torx head screwdriver small enough to remove the controller board and swap it with another. The smallest one that I have is a t-6 and it does not fit. If anyone knows of smaller torx screwdrivers, please let me know.
Thanks again for all the help. I really appreciate it.