Hi All -

I have a Hitachi Travelstar (hts722020k9sa00) which was in a dell notebook i've used for a year or so. The board on the notebook blew, not worth replacing, i just got a new machine.

The drive had a password set on it, which i know. I have a USB to SATA enclosure which i have put the drive in. i plug it into my Windows 7 machine, go into disk manager and its telling me i need to initialize it using either MBR or GPT. Before i did anything stupid i wanted to ask around.

What is the easiest way to make this drive accessible on my new notebook so i can pull some data off of it?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

There was ATA password set on the drive?
If so, boot up with MHDD and use UNLOCK and DISPWD commands.

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Odzyskiwanie danych - MyData.pl

If your drive is ATA password protected, there is no easy way to open it under windows.
You should unlock the drive first in MHDD (outside of windows) and you can't do it through USB adapter, you need to connect the drive directly to supported SATA port or to IDE port with converter.

If you have no fortune, the RAW password in the HDD is masked too, in this case you need to seek for professional help.

Good luck
Janos

ok so i made a bootable cd, put the drive in another notebook, booted it up. First thing it asked me for was the password, basically what looked like a bios message telling me the drive was protected and asked me for the password. I entered it and it rejected it. I tried it several times with no luck. I know this is the password, i had to enter it everytime this computer booted - thousands of times.

After that it booted into MHDD, but did not see the drive. Thoughts on why it would reject the password?

OK - so i tried in a different machine, got it to work, got the "done" command from MHDD when doing DISPWD. I stuck it back in the USB enclosure i have, but my win7 machine is still telling me i need to initialize. Is this soemthing with the USB enclosure?

you can unlock the drive 2 ways:
- unlock (until next power cycle)
- remove password (permanent)

I did not know how I set the password. I was trying to give a zero-fill using wd utilities from Hiren boot cd. At one point I created a partition using the WD utilities setup and it creates me a 137GB partitionsetting LBA to 24(I think). After some struggle I managed to set the lba to 48 I set after I did it (I donțt remember what program I used) with MHDD I discovered that the HDD is password protected.
Currently WD utiities I do not work anymore, when I try to start it, I see the pointer for about 2 seconds and it closes.
Also my(gigabyte) motherboard may saved a copy of bios on it.
Searching on internet I discovered that a rewrite of the firmware may resolve the problem.
Help pls.
sry for my english.

You can unlock it in Windows. Use Victoria for Windows.

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data recovery Poland

See this thread:
unlocking-ata-password-for-western-digital-t8374-200.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

10q m8 I really appreciate.