Over the last two weeks I have been teaching myself the ATA spec, and have written a complete ATA driver in Delphi that uses RAW I/O to access the HDDs. Through experimentation I have found a way to unlock the Western Digital WD80EB series of HDDs that are in XBOXs without needing the XBOX, a master key, or any form of information about the drive.

The key lies in a WD vendor command, I am not sure what the command actually is that I am using, but it seems to enable a service mode, the side effect of entering this "service mode", is that any security lock on the drive becomes disabled!. While in this mode, it is possible to call SECURITY_SET_PASSWORD and set a new password. After a re-scan of the disks in the computer, the password that was set can be used to unlock the drive.

I am still yet to tidy up the application, but I am just so excited to be able to unlock a WD80EB from an xbox without a master password that I had to post my success somewhere....

Oh, and btw, this forum is awesome, and this is my first contribution to it

Oh, and since this is a fairly generic vendor command for WD, it should work on most the WD hdds, I will have to see if I can get some more drives for testing.

Always like to see someone experimenting

Way to go!!!!!

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www.datarecoveryne.com

which tools are you using?

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data recovery service[/b]

Re-read the OP, I am writing my own tools using Delphi and direct low level I/O access. I have not released anything yet, its just a test application at the moment. Now that I have figured out how to do it, I will build a proper program that is not hard coded to only work with the primary master hdd in my PC, and then do some testing with different hardware configurations.

Because I am accessing the IO directly, not via the windows SDK, the HDD that is targeted must not be on the same bus as the HDD that has the OS on it. Also, there is some manual work involved (rescanning the connected HDDs) in the unlock process I would like to automate before I release anything.