Hi. I'm new to this forum so please excuse my naivety. I have, today, run HDD Erase 4.0 on my Seagate ST980815a hard drive but due to a power failure and my laptop battery being dead, it didn't finish. It did, however, set a password of 'idrive' on the hard drive. On rebooting it asked for the hard drive password but it will not accept 'idrive' saying the password is invalid. Can anybody please suggest why it will not accept the password it set and how I can get round this. I don't want the data but my Dell laptop will not allow me to access the drive without the right password. Are there any problems with the HDD Erase software? Thanks for any help.

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, without the HDD password, the hard drive is not 'configured' and so it is not accessible by any programs. I have tried to clear the password using Hirens Boot CD password cracker which didn't work and I have flashed the bios which also had no effect. It is very annoying that the HDD Erase software has set this password but will not now accept it. I presume the password is held on the hard drive itself or is it worth trying to run the HDD Erase software with the drive on another laptop? Thanks.

As explained by Spildit, re-running the same HDD Erase software should unlock the drive and then continue the secure erase process.


That's not uncommon (especially with laptops, but can occur with the BIOS on "normal" PCs too) when the drive's ATA password was set using a non-BIOS method, as in your case. In short, the characters which you enter into a PC BIOS disk password prompt, are sometimes not the exact bytes used for ATA password which is set on the drive.

There are a few different variations on what the BIOS may choose to send to the drive in the ATA password instead of what you type, but as long as you only used the PC BIOS to set / enter the drive's password, then you wouldn't know that something different is happening "under the covers". However when you try to manipulate the ATA password using 2 different methods (e.g. PC BIOS and HDD Erase) to the same drive, then you can run into this type of situation.

Other possible (more complex) workarounds exist for this situation, but hopefully won't be needed.

@prim1951,

Your last update had not appeared on the forum (probably delayed for moderation) when I replied, and so I could not take that new information into account in my previous reply. Unfortunately you are rushing into trying things which no-one here has suggested, nor would recommend (e.g. flashing the laptop BIOS), so from past experience on the forum, I may be wasting time making any further suggestions if you continue to try things on your own.


You are mistaken. This is nothing to do with HDDErase "not now accept[ing]" the password. Your problem is caused by not following the HDDErase instructions to prevent power failures on your laptop during the Secure Erase process, and the limitations of your laptop BIOS to allow you to re-run HDDErase.

Obviously it's too late for you now but, for the benefit of other readers who may find this thread in future, your issue is well-known, which is why it is specifically mentioned by the writers of HDDErase:

From the file HDDEraseReadMe.txt

and in the Revision History of HDDErase for v4.0:

If you don't want to follow the previous suggestions from Spildit then there are other options that could be tried, but I won't waste time writing them now in case you've already decided what to do...