Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
May 26th, 2026, 2:22
I have a 500 GB 2.5" Toshiba HDD, model MQ01ABU050W which is ATA locked. It is set at maximum security level. I don't have the user or master passwords (all the common ones I tried failed (spaces. Samsung, capital, lowercase, etc.) . The label shows an HP Part number, so I am guessing it came from an HP laptop (which I don't have).
I don't care about the data, just want to wipe and use the drive.
The label has a PSID (QR code and full string) but it appears to be useless for me since the drive does not support OPAL.
ZU.exe (DOS) failed to wipe it.
SeaTools bootable also failed to wipe it as it reports it does not support TCG.
AI says it is a paper weight. I managed to salvage an SSD that was locked by grounding a temperature sense pin, triggering errormod, and doing a secure erase with hdparm. Is anything similar possible in an HDD?
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