Alright, I have here in my posession my bosses laptop. Which for some reason unknown to him has come up with an invalid hd password. We were required at work to have BIOS and HDD passwords on our laptops, recently we changed to running PGP desktop encryption and now they said we could remove the HDD password. Well somehow his went batty or he changed it and cant remember. Either way I am now tasked with loading up a new laptop for him and trying to reinstall all of the database connections he uses on a day to day basis. Estimated time for reloading the laptop is looking like 2 days. So if there is some way to unlock this drive I would be EXTREMELY grateful.

I tried using ATAPWD on the drive and it shows an M for highest level of security. If I tell it to unlock it just tells me "Command rejected by drive". I also downloaded MHDD and tried using "Seagate" and the 25 spaces. That didnt work either. I am technically inclined so I can run with almost anything you give me, I just need some direction.

Thanks for all of the assistance.

Ask a pro to unlock it or pay by use the services that are available (check if your drive is supported). You can be probably asked to sign an agreement about responsibility and/or ownership of the drive.

There were "free" services that could unlock the drive loosing any data on it, don't know if they are available anymore and how they worked.

Personally I am not allowed to give you any technical detail , sorry.

There's not going to be a free and easy solution for this one.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Thats what I was wanting to know. Looks like Maxtor made the easy drives to unlock. Been reading a ton of detail on that, seagate seems to require a serial cable to connect to the drive and not for certain if it would work with this drive anyway.

Oh well at least I learned something, now its off to my hours of endless hell. I already have the replacement drive, so I might as well get to work.

Just some additional stuff here. Looks like the standard drives can be unlocked with some work using sediv and an RS232/ttl cable. Is this possible with the laptop drives? What hardware/software combo is required? Might be worth it for my company to invest in if its not more than a hundred dollars or so. If the cable is the same thats a 5-10 dollar expense. Thats less than the boss buying me lunch.

For 100USD a DR company will be happy to unlock it in your area. I would do it for 50USD. but im too far away.

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I am sure they would, however the boss will not allow us to pay an outside vendor for the service to any of our equipment when we ourselves are an IT firm. Now if on the other hand we can spend a few hundred and have the same result with repeatability, its worth it.

Basically it comes down to Labor vs Cost. I can reload the drive and save 100 dollars because I multi-task and it only impacts my productivity a small percent (as far as he is concerned). So if I am spending 100 on a tool that increases the speed and efficiency of a task that is ok. If I am spending 100 dollars paying a vendor to do a task that I can learn to do, I should learn to do it.

You have to understand, buying decisions are not mine, my decision is simply whether to say "yes" or "ok".

Forensics is a separate sector from IT. DataRecovery centres usually pick up the pieces after IT guy DIY jobs.

You know the saying "If i got a dollar for ever time i heard..." Well when i hear -" i took it to local IT shop" (then i start expecting the worst) especially if they say 'PeeSeaWorld'

If you took the time to research how to unlock the password on THAT specific drive it would equate to buying a professional tool in the hundreds of dollars to do it.And you would still need some training on how to use it. So that is not acceptable.

That is just my advice- don't take it personally - because we are talking about two different things here. If there was a simple way to do it - it would be plastered all over the interwebs. and the reason of ATA lock would be pointless.

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I understand. As a technician I know how that can go, we typically tell our customers in these situations if their data needs recovering they will need to get in touch with a company that handles that, as we dont. As well I know what its like when we take over an account and they tell us who used to service their stuff. Nothing beats opening a machine and finding electrical tape and other assorted hacks. Just figured if it was something I could learn and we could offer it might be worth it. Still want to learn but the more I go into it on this drive the more I see Seagate makes hacking their drives a pain.

Unfortunately there are no data recovery firms anywhere close by to make it worthwhile to have it checked out. Fortunately though it does make me think there might be a need for something like that in our area. Closest place is over 4 hours away and they seem to focus on "recovering data from crashed pc's". Yeah, hooking a drive up in an external enclosure and getting data from directories isnt that hard. I want to learn more of the real stuff now like unlocking these badboys. See back in the day we did all sorts of stuff with drives, swapped out interface cards, hot swapped drives to attempt to get access.... Anymore we just swap and go and if you dont backup your data its your loss. Figures the boss would be the guy who doesnt back up his data.

As far as the time in researching the specific unlock for this drive, I've been on it all afternoon while the other system has been reimaging. If my boss knew I had spent this much time on this one issue he would have come in and smashed the drive. The only reason I have kept on it is because I am already at the worst case scenario of reloading a new drive in his laptop. So at this point if I kill the drive trying to recover it there isnt a real loss.

Good luck

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It takes much more than a cable... Did you try on Seagate forum or ask Seagate itself ?