Good day to all.

I would like to understand why my hard drive is locked when accessed in another laptop.

HISTORY: Hitachi hard drive is from an Acer Extensa 5420 laptop. Laptop is dead already. I set-up a BIOS password on the laptop, but I did not set up any hard drive encryption or password. The drive is travelstar 5K160, 160GB.

I tried using a USB enclosure for the drive and accessed it in another laptop but it's not readable perhaps due to the password. It is detected by the device manager with the right capacity. It's also recognized in the disk management but can't be initialized, maybe due to the password again.

I'm not sure if my analysis are correct, but I hope you could shed out clarifications and best of all, solution for the drive.

I badly need the files. Please help.

With much appreciation and anticipation,
Duke

Most probably you add the password to the HD too...

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http://www.pclab.com.pt facebook.com/PCLAB.A.T
ACELab partner

You can unlock this HDD with SD HD DR for Hitachi or UDMA. Both can do this for you. Otherwise you will need to find a DR company in your area and have them do this for you. I am sure the fee will not be as much as investing in the tools to do this one with.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Hi pclab, I'm sure I did not set any HDD password.

Hi poehere, what do you mean by SD HD DR for Hitachi? Is that a software? Where can I buy that? And UDMA? Is that a software too?

Pardon me, but I'm not really too techie. I just research things that I thought might be of help to my issue.

You can use MHDD boot cd & it will confirm if the drive has a password set

BIOS password, by default of the system, put a User password on your drive...as was already mentioned. You can spend thousands of dollars for hardware tools to remove the password or you can pay a lab lower fee to remove the password for you. I'd think that about $250 is a fair price for this service, but I'm sure that someone out there will likely do it for less, while there are others who will charge more.

Don't be surprised if the lab asks you to sign some sort of document stating that you are the rightful owner of the drive.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Salvation Data's HD Doctor for Hitachi:
http://datarecoverytoolsreview.blogspot ... eview.html
http://www.salvationdata.com/data-recov ... doctor.htm

"UDMA" = PC3000-UDMA:
http://www.acelaboratory.com/pc3000.udma.php

FWIW, you can buy a used Acer Extensa 5420 laptop for less than US$200 on eBay. You could probably resell it for the same money.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.