Hello. I have a stack of Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 7Y250M0 drives lying around that all have passwords set on them. I'm hoping to find a solution that will allow me to bypass or unlock this password so I can use these drives once again. Searching online has led me to try Darik's Boot and Nuke, which will supposedly erase the security encryption portion of the drive, but this hasn't led to any success. I'm not concerned with data recovery, just making these drives able to throw in old PC's. Thanks in advance

No way without specialized equipment or knowing how to do it. If you are LEGIT owner of the drives and assume written responsibility any pro would unlock and erase for few bucks. Personally I can't give any detail neither in public nor in private as it can be potentially used for unlawful purposes.

I got the same request some time ago for unlocking more than 3000 hdd`s, and all of them were Maxtor 160GB SATA drives.

they belongs to one french company which offers Sat. Cable Service, and their Biz. did not go well, and they wanted here to unlock them all and sell the complete PC`s as PC`s not as Sat. Receivers.

i dono if that is the same but the one i did here was having a complete Pro. Encryption App. (Rainbow) UNITS

so i dono if that is the same or not, but w/o proper tools you cannot, and depends how much would u like to invest on such a solution based on the Qty. of the drives u got.

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Hi,

http://www.hddunlock.com/purchase/ (data is wiped)
or
http://hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/licenses/ (data is safe)
Both cost but the first option is the cheapest.


Loki

PS: Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 7Y250M0 is supported

Glad to hear that there is a solution available, but unfortunately the HDD unlock software doesn't fall in my price range. These drives were from an old computer cluster RAID server at the university which I work at. I have a feeling that the RAID controller may have used an internal password of sorts for drives used in the system (if such a thing exists). I suspect this because the old manager of the particular computing cluster doesn't remember ever setting any sort of passwords on the drives. Unfortunately this was a few years ago, and the particular server they were used in is long gone. That being said I wouldn't want to pay a high price for drives in unknown condition; I'm simply trying to make something out of junk in the storage closet.

@BlackST- Well I was hoping to come here to learn somewhat how to do it I can understand that posting info on how to bypass drive encryption would be shaky grounds, but could you point me in any direction (reading materials, general info, etc) that would help me? I would be willing to destroy 30 drives if it would allow me to gain experience and knowledge to salvage just 1. (they were goin in the trash anyway)

Once again thanks for all replies

NO. Sorry, but this info is proprietary, I do not endorse dispersal of information and finally in the wrong hands it can be used for unlawful purpose.

P.s. Data is not encrypted, the drive in this state will only return ABRT at every request of accessing data.

Put the lot on ebay as parts.

Most likely many will have defective sectors on the surface anyway. Cant remember the last time I saw a good Healthy 7Y250M0....

@bfarren240:

As already explained by other members, there are real concerns about unlocking drives which have been deliberately locked. However...

Now that you have given this new information about the history of these drives (i.e. they were previously attached to a RAID controller), this reminded me of one RAID controller manufacturer (3Ware) who (unusually, in my experience), set their own (documented) password on the drives attached to at least some of their RAID controllers.

Therefore, since this info is public, I see no harm in linking to the manufacturer's own webpage which explains the process of removing their password. Note their very specific instructions about the length of the password. Of course, this info is only useful if your drives were attached to one of these 3Ware controllers, and if that is what set the password on your drives!

https://www.3ware.com/3warekb/article.aspx?id=13502

And, of course, the drives may have faults anyway... Good luck!

P.S. What you read about DBN erasing the "security" info on a drive, was wrong - as you've found...

SUCCESS!!! Thank you very much vulcan, this was exactly the information that I needed. Using the the user password "3wareUserPassword" in HDA2 v 4.5.3 with a fill value that placed "20" in the hex password allowed me to unlock these drives.

One final question though: what are some recommended utilities for testing the condition of these drives? (I was thinking HDA2, IBM-Hitachi DFT, Seatools) The average reallocated sector count per drive is around 40; I'm not sure if this is a sign of a drive on its way out.

While it isn't good to hear that most 7y250m0's are in bad condition, I'm estatic over the fact that I can now use these drives. Thanks to all!

You're welcome


For reasons beyond the scope of a short answer, you can't prove that a drive is operating correctly - you can only try to infer this from "good" results, but "good" results do not mean that the drive has no problems. Two general purpose tests you could consider include (a) a full read benchmark graph (e.g. using HDDScan or HD Tune Pro etc.) - you do NOT want to see sharp sawtooth-like dips in the read throughput. You can do something similar in text mode using an MHDD "scan"; (b) the other general test is a "long" SMART test (again, HDDScan or MHDD can be used to tell the drive to do this test, as could many others), and the drive should pass. But...


Unfortunately correct, this is bad news - as some members predicted about the likely condition of these drives earlier in the thread. Depending on other test results, and on your attitude to risk, you could try using them for non-essential data while monitoring the SMART attributes for any other signs of degradation (e.g. reallocated sector count or pending reallocation etc. SMART attributes getting worse). But you might get no warning before data is lost. Is it worth the risk? With the cost of new disks being so low, personally, I doubt that the risk is worthwhile, but it's your data so your choice. Don't say you weren't warned...

MHDD is good. Check here on hddguru software site.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

play lottery today because if it wasn't THIS VERY CASE there is no way to know or reset lock without dealing with internal firmware , especially in case of master pw and security=max set.

I really should have haha. I had a hunch this was an odd case; thats one of the main reasons why I posted.

To clarify on my previous post on the average reallocated sector count: The RAW value of reallocated sectors is 40, not the S.M.A.R.T. attribute. After reading up on it further, it looks like the majority of drives showing 253 as the value is a good sign

In most cases, the raw value of SMART attribute 5 is the actual number of reallocated sectors (although the spec doesn't require that to be the case) - so that number (in your example, 40) still is one of the reported values of that SMART attribute, just not the interpreted / coooked / normal (one byte) reported value, but the raw (can be multi-byte) value instead (same attribute, different value, different interpretation).