I was performing a secure erase on my HDD and the power went out. Now the drive is locked with a HDD password. I had NULL for the password (the utility told me that would mean it would have no password when finished).
I would like to unlock my HDD and I don't care about the data.

Tried to remove the password using various tools on the UBCD.
ATA Password tool said that it didn't detect any drives.
mHDD 4.6 I tried the following:
Unlock (tried with 32 spaces for the master and user passwords)
Dispwd (tried with 32 spaces for the master and user passwords)
ERASE PREPARE (did first and last sector)
ERASE UNIT (did first and last sector)
Didn't seemed to work. (mHDD detects the drive fine and lets me know that the drive is locked btw)

I found some excerpts from the SATA specification that said if I issue a SECURITY ERASE PREPARE command and then a SECURITY ERASE UNIT command that it would unlock the drive. I was wondering how I might go about doing that or any other method that would unlock my drive.

Here is some basic information on my drive:

Toshiba
MK1655GSX
HDD2H25
160GB

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Edit:
I believe that my HDD is only in high security mode

Re-read MHDD docs.
After you revert what you have done - pwd clears - lock again and redo. Did you try FASTERASE alone with the pw you used ? MUST work.

FASTERASE (got to choose a new user password)
DISPWD (using the password that I created)

^ worked

Thank you very much BlackST, you just saved me from having to purchase another HDD.

hi, i hav esimilar problem that post creator
i have Hitachi C5k500.B-320
i dont care about content - i was using it for backups
it looks that it is locked somehow,

BlackST, can you help me with this ? what kind of info you need to help me?

need nothing ... just use MHDD.

If the disk is just locked it will be erased and lock will be cleared, but if it appears LOCKED because - for example but not limited to - of firmware problem, MHDD is useless.

Did you lock it / could know PW ?

no,
i have/had a satelite reciever with this disk inside, but it broke down just after end of warranty, so i figured out that i can get this drive and use it in usb case and rest throw to trash
the data on it are not important, just some cartoons recorded for my children from cartoon network

the drive is visible fine in my laptop bios and in mhdd but i have only this mhdd script for WD (which is the only one in internet )

HITACHI is not WD and the "script" was only for some limited case.

And (bad news) if the security is MAX , you can't unlock it with "free" tools.
Many STB lock the disk due to DRM this way. Check first how the disk is locked.

it looks that security is not set to max, however disk is frozen,
i dont know why i cannot recognized it under mhdd 4.6 ? maybe i need to wait little bit longer
but hdat2 see it normally and original dfu from ibm/hitachi also see it

here are some pics

i cannot post here any pictures but you can see it on dropbox
anyway hdat2 says that disk is frozen dc0
master password unchanged

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30835469/hitachi/DSC_0116.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30835469/hitachi/DSC_0117.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30835469/hitachi/DSC_0118.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/30835469/hitachi/DSC_0119.jpg