Dear Dmitry ,thank you for your succesful program mhdd ,but this wonderful program get some problems to us. at first while i repair ibm-hitchi hdd the drive become locked i failed to unlockhim.you told me press b 32sym i tried but the drive still locked .please master Dmitry tellme how to unlock this driver and any drive meetme locked and donot know its passward master or user


with my thanks
Mostafa Mohmmed
Cairo,egypt.

Press caps lock before entering that password.

I have a IBM Travelstar Hard Drive which is locked with an ATA password. The Security is set to Maximum on the disk and though I know the password I cant unlock the disk. The disk is locked with a User Password, which I know, but is there any other way I can unlock the disk? And why am i not able to unlock the disk with the correct password? Is it encrypted by the Laptop that created it?

I've got similar situation:
I've used MHDD to lock the drive in my Acer TM512 and while next boot-up the BIOS rejected the HDD password - for me the solution was to turn on laptop without HDD, boot to MS-DOS from flopy, connect the HDD, run MHDD and unlock the drive - MHDD have accepted same password which BIOS has previously rejected. The conclision is - BIOS and MHDD may use different password encoding.

if you know the password, try unlock command first and then must use dispwd command in mhdd. you cna also try hddunlock. it's a sets of hdd lock and unlock tool.
good luck!

From what I've written before it's quite clear that BIOS and MHDD encodes HDD passwords in different way, I don't know the exact routine, but for example one may use scancodes and other may use ASCII codes, also national (qwertz, azerty) keyboards may be a problem.

MHDD does not encode password.

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Yes!

It depends how do you understand encode, everything you type on your keyboard is somehow encoded or if you prefer to not use that term - it's somehow represented in computer's memory, letters and decimal numbers can't be stored and processed by computer in their native form.

I don't like such kind of demagogy. Everybody understood what does it mean "mhdd does not encode password".

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Yes!

You're thinking about encryption not encoding... but maybe I'm wrong - but how would you explain my case? Why passwor set in MHDD was not accepted by BIOS, but only by MHDD and vice versa?

MHDD does not encode and does not encrypt the password, it sends it as plain text to the drive (sure, using wires, bits, bytes, words, etc.)

What does BIOS... You can disassemble it and see .

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Yes!

I do not undertand many things about passwords, but I'm thinking that maybe , and I'm saying maybe has some problem with the interpretation here, tzork is talking about BIOS passord and Bastard is talkin about ATA password, and IMHO this things are differents.

No, I'm talking about HDD Password, but in one case set from BIOS Setup and in the other case set from MHDD. Laptop BIOSes usually allow putting separate Power On, Setup and HDD Passwords.

Most laptops store their password in keyboard scan codes. mhdd uses strieght ascii. And then the newer hard drive will encrypt those when writing them. Dells and Ibms are stored as scan codes in bios on a serial eeprom.

Yep, you need to get the vendors lap top scan codes. Or just get a identical laptop and use that

And that's exactly what I was trying to say... everything in computers i somehow encoded... MHDD uses ASCII encoding, while BIOS uses raw keyboard scancodes.