I have a ST9500325AS Seagate HDD in my Lenovo laptop. And a few days ago I discovered that I forgot my master password for the hard drive.

I have googled a multiple of times for solutions and found many suggestions of tools similar to atapw and MHDD. I was against the usage of similar software, since I assumed they have something to do with messing up with the firmware, however out of curiosity I thought of ONLY accessing them, just for the sake of knowledge.

I first opened MHDD via the CMD in Win7, I found a message similar to "primary channel is disabled". I pressed ENTER, and it took me to a command line. I typed ID, then pressed ENTER to receive the hard drive information. I received a red text of the sorts of, "the drive is not ready". I said so far so good and closed the CMD window. Nothing more than that. I might have repeated the previous steps several times though, but that was about it.

I also came by another software called atapw. I opened it normally by windows double-click, a small DOS window appeared for a few seconds and then disappeared without a trace. And that was about it as well.

Afterwards I restarted the computer for reassurance, and the first thing I did was running HD sentinel's short self test, it passed. I then ran HD tune's quick error scan, it all came in green, SMART reports; nothing special. The HDD also appears in the BIOS normally, and the passwords and everything seems to work alright over there.

But then it came to Seatools. I started it, and it showed: "SCSI: Scanning for supported drives" for a moment and disappeared, so maybe successful, it turned to "ATA: Scanning for supported drives" that's when I received the message: "Fatal error: Device discovery, Not found void, ThrowWithExtendedInfo(System.Management.ManagementsStatus)", I click OK and it disappears, leaving a process called stxcon.exe in the task manager with ALOT of CPU usage. I have to end the process myself to be rid of it.

Previously, Seatools have been starting fine on my hard drive. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it many times after that, but with the same problem. It's version is: "1.2.0.10" the latest available.

My worries is that I might've messed with the Firmware of my HDD, or worse a spyware has got into the unreadable area of the drive, by these vague tools, (at least to me). Given that I get some mouse lags every now and then, but again I got no clue how what is where anymore.

What could be the problem with my hard drive drive? Your advice will be GREATLY appreciated.