I have a Dell Optiplex 745 brought in for "repair". The customer says he purchased the computer from "some guy" and has not been able to use it.

Managed to clear the CMOS password, then discovered that the two WD800JD's were password-protected. I've never been in this situation before, and do not know what to do.

I've done some reading. One idea that interested me was to "reflash" the firmware with the idea that whatever password is on the HD's would be erased. Booted my desktop with a floppy DOS disk and ran WD's "wdcha059.exe". It said the "update" was not applicable to the WD800JD I had installed as secondary.

This is only a $50.00 repair, so I do not want to purchase software or hardware. I'm doing it for the learning experience more than anything else.

What should I do ? What do I need to know ? Etc...

Any help appreciated & thanks in advance.


~ Jonny

Last night I I booted with a DOS floppy and ran MDHD on the WD800JD. It confirmed that the drive had an ATA password and that the security level? was "high".

Tried the Master Password "wdcwdc..." (etc...) in both lowercase and uppercase with "fail" as a result.

MDHD lets you enter more than the 32 character maximum, which makes me wonder exactly how many characters the Western Digital Master Password is. Can anyone confirm that it is exactly 32 characters long ?

Also, I recall reading a post that mentioned a software that allows you to verify if the Master Password has been changed from the Factory Default, but can't find that post again.

Finally, I read a post that said the easiest way to get a functioning HD in this situation is to simply RMA the drive(s) back to WD. Is this an option ?

Thanks in advance,

~ Jonny

WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD

so when you type it in start counting W-1 D -2 C - 3 until you get to D -32 which is the last character

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Thanks guru. I tried the mhdd32 (ver4.5) floppy again and this time carefully typed out exactly 32 characters of "wdcwdc..." in both lower & upper case, and under both "master" and "user" password.

All failed.

Do I have any other options ?

I'm using this as a learning experience, so time is not important. I'd like to learn how to do this.

I've read other posts where people are able to use some software to actually read the password at a particular address. Is this something I could do ?

This evening I booted to DOS and ran HDDErase.

It could not find ANY of the drives I have on my system. It's report looked something like:

P0 = None
P1 = None
S0 = None
S1 - None

I don't know what this means. I've read that some motherboards give problems to some of these softwares. Could this be the case ?

Any help appreciated & thanks in advance,


~ Jonny

If you search this forum a little you can find out some info on password protected WD drives.

Using an older version of MHDD allows to run some ATA terminal scripts... there is a script referenced on this site that allows you to either remove the password or display it, i forget which...
good luck.. like i said.. It is on the forum a couple times for sure...

TDII

http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/HDDEraseWeb.zip

try this maybe your doing something wrong

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All went well until I plugged the drive in.

I've booted to DOS and have ran HDDErase numerous times. There's not much TO go wrong. I get 3 prompts, and then it says that P0, P1 (PATA controllers, I assume) and S0, S1 (SATA Controllers) are "none". After this I cannot select anything.

This is not an Intel chipset, btw. I read somewhere that this is important for something. (FWIW, I have an AMD Opteron 165 on a DFI RS482 m/b.)



I found this thread:
http://forum.hddguru.com/ata-password-bypassing-t12257-40.html?hilit=wd%20script#p88096

Which gives directions:



I followed the directions, created the script text file, "issued" the command "wdpwd.txt" and it failed at Line 7 "CHECKDRQ" with "ERROR: No DRQ"



There was no file "42.bin" on the bootable floppy.

What do I do next ? and/or What am I doing wrong ?

Thanks in advance.

(This is getting fun, btw...)

Test
Yesterday, I submitted an extensive post, and it was held for moderation. Sent PM to Admin.

Do I need to re-do the entire post/is it gone forever ?

TIA,

~ Jonny

First, I've decided that the "P0, P1, (etc...)" stands for "Primary" and "Secondary", not PATA and SATA. And also that the tool "atapwd" cannot access SATA drives. I'd like to get some confirmation on this.

Also, after reading another thread where this worked, I created and booted a Hiren's Boot CD, and used one of the tools to attempt to unlock the WD800JD, and failed numerous times. Didn't see this coming and didn't know it could happen, and I don't know how bad it is, but the utility said that the "counter limit" had been reached/exceeded after failing to unlock the HD with a Master password (variations of "wdc..."). I assume there is recorded in the firmware the number of times a Master password has failed, and that after a certain number, something bad happens. I can no longer access the "unlock" options.

How bad is this ? Is it permanent ?

Also, one of the Hiren's Disk Utilities reported that the Master password has not been changed (is how I interpreted this). Have I interpreted this correctly ? If so, then why is the standard "wdc..." Master Password failing to unlock the drive ? Is there/are there other WD Master Passwords ? If so, where would I find them ?

I'm continuing my efforts to access these drives (there are two, one has the the counter exceeded and the other does not), and would be very appreciative of any help offered.

Regards,

~ Jonny

http://sandeep-vaniya.blogspot.com/2008 ... f-ata.html



It appears that the attempt limit counter will reset after powering-off. I haven't tried it yet. If anyone else in the same situation reading this, you can assume it works unless I post otherwise.

Okay, so today I moved the unlocking operation from my desktop to the computer that originally came with the 2 WD800JD's, on the chance that it was something odd with my motherboard that was causing the problem. The results were the same.

Also, today I re-tried the script quoted above. In trying to deal with the "Error: No DRQ" message, I deleted the line "CHECKDRQ", on the chance that the script might complete to the most critical part (I'm thinking) were it writes the file "42.bin" (which should have the Master Password encoded in Hex).

Failed, with error message (again) "No DRQ".

I've done some searching via Google for what this command "CHECKDRQ" is, and what it does to no result.

Any help on why this is failing, what it is supposed to do and how I can overcome this problem would be greatly appreciated.

~ Jonny

Okay, it's been a few days with no new replies. I'm stuck at trying to run the script mentioned in the previous posts that is ending with a "No DRQ" error.

I've read other posts which mention multiple scripts available, but cannot find any others so if someone could aim me in the direction of alternative scripts to try, I'd appreciate it.

Also the script language. What do the commands mean, such as "waitnbusy" and "checkdrq", and the others. I've Googled for definitions and some kind of primer and cannot find anything. It seems the script language is something specific for MHDD, but I cannot find any kind of documentation.

I've got an entire list of questions.

Apparantly "drq" means "data request" and I am under the impression that the requested data is going to a DMA channel ? Something to do with the motherboard, hardware, hard drive controller or what ? How does this tie into asking the Hard Drive about the data stored on it.

The Master Password is stored somewhere on the Hard Drive. Is it in the firmware, or on the disk itself ?

I've seen pictures of the "data registry" (?) and the Master Password is kept at a specific word (42?). I did some reading and learned that there are two security levels, "high" and "maximum". As an aside (to trying to unlock my two WD800JD's) I am curious as to how a "high" level Master Password is accesible and a "maximum" is not. What is the difference between the two; how is a Master Password stored such that it cannot be read by anyone/anything ?

It seems very odd to me that, given how common a problem it is with ATA password protected hard-drives are, that there are not several freeware utilities availabe to crack these passwords, like there are for cracking the passwords for XP & Vista.

Is ATA password protection that much more sophisticated ?

I'm still working on these two WD800JD's. I've given my working 80 Gbyte HD to the customer, and have kept the two bad ones on the chance that I might be able to get them working.

I've searched for some kind of guide for the MHDD program, so that I can possibly write a script that will dump the ATA password to a .bin file.

I'm really, REALLY stuck, and any help would be appreciated.


~ Jonny

Do you have a SATA-ATA adapter?

It might not work but you shoud be able to access the drive using MHDD

_________________
I dont need a gun, I've got a Donk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwpZFsVyues

Thanks for the response ! (It's been getting a bit lonely here...)

Both drives are SATA, my motherboard has SATA ports and MHDD is able to access the drives just fine (there are two). It's just that the script (posted earlier) that is supposed to dump the ATA password results in error when it is run. Why it is doing this, and what I can do about it are the crux of my situation.

I found a sort of "guide" here, but none of the commands in the script are referenced in the guide, so again I'm really REALLY stuck.

Again thanks for the help. Any help at all is greatly appreciated.

~ Jonny

You need the adapter to plug the SATA drive into an ATA port. There are some slight differences between the two interfaces.

SATA registers do not always return the same codes as ATA drives. I have seen bit 2 set in the Status register - as if it is waiting for the interrupt to complete. So if bit 2 is set, the register status will be incorrect.. e.g. showing 52h instead of 50h, etc so MHDD would return No_Drq if bit 2 is set (is that right Dmitry?)

A soft reset will clear the bus, but if the drive is waiting to send data you will lose the buffer - and the password with it ...

_________________
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

Thanks for the information. I've dome some checking and there seems to be quite a few SATA to IDE converters available. I'd rather not waste money on something that will quickly fail. Do you (or anyone else) have a recommendation on a specific converter ?

I found that I'm required to disable AHCI for MHDD to detect SATA HDDs!

Thanks for the tip ! This is still an ongoing project (meaning both drives are still just sitting here, glaring at me).

I'm not sure if I have a BIOS setting to do this ?

Is this a BIOS setting ?