Seagate 160GB ST3160815AS SATA drives need unlocking

[NT51]

seagate.com said that there was no firmware update available. I just need to clear the ATA password on these. I don't care about the data. If I could find the password for one it would probably unlock the others. Is it worth it? Otherwise I'll put them on a shelf and maybe in the future things will change. They have around 45000 hours which is probably fairly high for a desktop drive. Is it worth messing with this? I might have 15 of them that are locked. I don't know yet.

On seagateunlock.com I read about HDD unlock wizard but it says that the service has been shut down.

ST3160815AS
P/N: 9CY132-021
Firmware: 3.CHH
Date code: 09305 Site code: TK

Thanks!

[recuperodatiroma]

Victoria 4.3 has a function for ata password removal user and master you can try

[NT51]

Thanks for all the advice. I have finally made some progress with this, and I was waiting until I had done something to post again. I have a TTL serial adapter. I'm running the TTL side at 5V since I measured 5V out of one of the pins, so it must be 5V logic. Is the side of the 4 pin connector that is closest to the SATA connector RX (to TX) or TX (to RX)? I have seen diagrams both ways.

Either way I can't get it to work. With hardware flow control turned off, I can get a local echo in my terminal at any baud rate by connecting the TTL lines together. Maybe my TTL adapter is not made correctly? Do I need a pull up to 5V resistor on the TX connection (going to drive RX)? Right now it is open collector, but the drive seems to be putting its own 5V pull up on it.

Is the drive supposed to print anything during start up, even if I don't send any serial data to it? I've tried 9600 and 38400 but nothing happens. I kept pressing ctrl+z and ctrl+d but nothing was printed.

[fzabkar]

Is the drive supposed to print anything during start up, even if I don't send any serial data to it?

You should see something like this:

Code:

Reset
4096k x 16 DRAM
NHAWK - 1_Disk S-LE 11-14-07_16:30

Buzz HM SFI
!
(P)SATA Reset

The baud rate should be set to 9600bps:

https://forum.acelaboratory.com/download/file.php?id=160&sid=92ceaec3466e6c5c5b296f51870ecc1c&mode=view

As for the TTL voltage, I would have expected to see 3.3V rather than 5V, but ICBW.

[NT51]

Thanks for your reply! I hooked the TTL side up to 3.3V and now it works fine. The drive Tx was always sending a low value to my Rx with it connected to 5V. For some reason the drive Rx has a 5V pull up which made me think it was 5V logic.

I'll experiment more later.

[NT51]

Update: I followed the directions to read the password from the vendor track. The first part was "Seagate " just like in the example, and after that there were more letters which I assumed was the user password. Using mhdd unlock, I selected master password. I typed in Seagate with 25 spaces after it and it did not work. The next time I tried user password and I entered in the password that I got from the serial interface and it worked!

Is there some kind of feature to disable the master password that they used? Can the master password never be changed?

[fzabkar]

The master password can overrise the user password only under certain conditions. You need to consult the ATA standards documents for more information.

There are links to the various versions of the ATA standard at the following URL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA