Serious question about password protected drives

[wat4]

I buy laptops locally and every now and again I stumble upon a password protected hard drive, most typically from semi old toshibas (apparently this was a problem a couple years ago and now it pops up again)

Basically I just want to get rid of the Data/password and use the drive normally again, instead of it sitting in a pile. I know there has to be a way to do this but I can't seem to find a way.

In my googling on the subject mostly I get articles from <2013 and they suggest a "master password" and this doesn't work for me, and sometimes I can get the drive recognized in bootable tools but formatting etc doesn't work because its read only.

I will be monitoring this thread for solutions/answering possible questions.

[wat4]

Right now I have a stack of about 5 different makes/models of drives. Typically I just sell them as is but I wanted to see if there was a better solution available as hard drives are precious in my business.

I knew I would get the stolen laptop thing, but alas most of them come from people who are simply not smart enough to know how to set a password or even know what I am asking about.

With that said the problem with the older toshiba laptops is that when they die and sit idle for a while the bios likes to set a password on the bios and hard drive for some reason. Feel free to google this it is widely documented with many cases all over the internet.

When I buy the computers I do ask for any passwords on the system and the problem is I buy them broken so I can't test them right there on the spot. Plus they typically have been replaced long ago so they have been sitting around a long time and people don't remember they set a password, or they think I'm talking about a windows password which isn't what I am looking for.

Also I don't care about the data on the drives, I just want the drive to be usable again.

I'm not suggesting passwords are a problem, I'm suggesting passwords are my particular problem.

[data-medics]

As Spildit already highlighted, it's easy to do but requires expensive equipment.

I can remove a Toshiba password in about 2 min. But, I'm working in front of a PC-3000 station which is built for just this type of HDD manipulation. I don't think there's a free software option for Toshiba like there is for WD. WD put a master pass into their drives, making the purpose of an ATA lock basically moot. Toshiba was a bit more security conscious.