HDD GURU FORUMS

Freshly powered-on IDE drive supporting ATA password
but no password set and not locked
and can read and write to the drive ok

MHDD shows it as Security: High, OFF

I try using PWD to set a (user) password
and I specify a password (either a short one or one padded to 32 characters)
but it comes back with Fail

What am I doing wrong ?
It used to work when I did it a few weeks ago

Same on all the drive that support ATA passwords I've tried
both with MHDD 4.5 and 4.6


Supplemental Q's
Any way to change the default Master password ?
Any way to put the drive in MAX security mode?


Thanks

I'm just experimenting out of interest

Doh

Looks like the drive (or rather drives) were in Frozen

Victoria (excellent program) shows as OFF, Frozen

Power cycling the drive unfreezes it
And the reason it used to work is that was when I was hot-plugging drives

Looks like the bios? on my desktop was sending Password Change Freeze to all drive at power on
(to protect it from anything malicious trying to lock you out of your drives)


Victoria also seems to allow selecting the use of MAX mode
and might also allow the changing of Master password (TBI) [only relevant to High mode of course]

It's the BIOS. It's sending the Freeze on boot to all drives to prevent virus from setting passwords. Just power on the PC, boot it with your MHDD and only plug the drive after the BIOS post.
If you have a modular BIOS like award you can mess with the bios and place there a special module to manage the ATA passwords directly on the BIOS.