On the bench I have a clients Gateway 4026GZ with a Fujitsu MHT2040AT drive. The laptop was locked on all 3 levels... <mother - teenage daughter facebook dipute> daughter now cannot remember passwords (big supprise). I have cleared all but the user level ata password. Due to the low value of the drive and no concern for the data I figured this would be a good place to continue my foray into messing with hard drives.

Disclaimer: ( I am hesitant to call my work recovery or repair, as my prior accomplishments have really been limited to making the drives I have worked on, with great assistance from the gurus here, readable again and cloning the contents off)

Here is where I am now: I can boot into MHDD 4.6 with a bootable cd with MHDD on it. After erroring out on 3 attempts to enter 8 character hdd password laptop gives me hdd password failed !! Cause Hdd No Function !!, no biggie it still boots on cd and MHDD still can find drive. I can pull up the drives parameters with SHIFT F2. I get a warning about being locked, it shows Security: high, ON. To me that is showing it is locked with a user level pass and not a master. When I issue an unlock command, select master, enter 32 blanks spaces it comes back as fail.

Note: I tried putting an unlocked drive in the laptop, but bios did not recognise it. I am leary to keep tossing drives in this laptop for fear of having it lock up another drive.

I know I can just run it on my cloner and pay the $4.99 to get the password cleared, and get back a blank but functioning 40Gb disk ~ that in all likelyhood will be dead in less than a year.

My questions are can I actually display or read areas of this drive to assist my in locating hints as to what the user pass might have been - or is in this instance ? I have tried using the 32 blank as a master PW, but I am unsure of what actual keyboard character generates a "NULL". Sorry for being a bit vague in my description of issue and solutions, I am trying not to give away the store as it were... Any help is appreciated, PM me if you feel more comfortable keeping this off-line.

Thanks again

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Right now I am looking at the drive and the only thing spinning is my head !

O.K., new questions since the defening silence from previous post:
Using MHDD what area(s) of the drive can I view ?
Does the drive need to be unlocked to view anything beyond ID ?
And does it matter what level security it set to ?
Are the Fujitsu commands ultra secret ?

Thanks in advance,
Scott

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Right now I am looking at the drive and the only thing spinning is my head !

fujitsu and all brands commands are ultra secret.
If the drive is locked by ATA password, MHDD will show the PWD red light between the status bytes.
If the drive is locked, you can't pass the scan command (F4).

Janos

Thanks for the response, thread has been getting views but no replies.

I figured the commands were secret, at this juncture I do not really need them... I think.
The drive is locked by an ATA password, Security is high (not MAX), and ON so I beleive it is only locked at the user level password. I have not tried a scan command but have copied some info out to files using ATOF command. It gives an error on some blocks but I still get an output file. I can look at file in hex editor and translate to ascii/ansi/whatever. I saw some posts about other dumps containing password. I figure if it were a user password it should stick out in file, I have no idea what addy to start at, so I just scroll thru as best I can. As I stated I do not really need or want the data that is on the drive as I will fresh install os as soon as it is usable sgain. I am just on a quest to see if I can unlock it. I already know that I can get it cleared for 5$, because it is such a little drive the economic risk is small and the data is of low value. I am just using the opportunity to educate myself. If it all goes wrong, I put a new drive in laptop and reload it with XP and be done.

_________________
Right now I am looking at the drive and the only thing spinning is my head !

SCAN return "!" (ABRT) each block on locked drive and ATOF doesn't work.

Does ATOF command work if security on HIGH not MAX ? I can run command. How large a file does ATOF command usually return ? I did 101 blocks (LBA0 - 100) and got back a 51,712 b file. Seems in the ballpark for a 512 b/sector disk. It did report error on every sector but listed the file size getting bigger every block. Granted for recovery purposes it is probably useless data, but if I can pick out a few ascii characters in a row that might indicate a password dropped in by a teenager I can always try them in the laptop at boot.

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Right now I am looking at the drive and the only thing spinning is my head !

No, doesn't work.
Size of the file is correct in your case, but unfortunately you are getting no data out - check the outfile with editor.

As I have never looked at one before this, what SHOULD I see ?

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Right now I am looking at the drive and the only thing spinning is my head !

@G_Mez,
Several parts of your earlier questions would have needed long replies/clarifications which I don't have time to give. This one is an easy answer, however, so...

Since you mention that you've "read" LBA0-100, then you would expect so see an MBR in the first 512 bytes of your output file (i.e. from what was LBA0 of the drive) when using a hex editor to view the file. If you've never seen an MBR before, then a quick Google will give you some examples.

However, as has already been explained to you, if the drive is locked then you won't see an MBR in your ATOF output file, as the disk will not have actually been readable.

Without the proprietary knowledge of how to read the SA on those disks (which, as a trade secret, I would not expect to be discussed here due to its value), I don't think this is a DIY job. If the drive password was set via the laptop BIOS (which is what I suspect), you could try a different "attack vector" of investigating that BIOS and any backdoors that it may have...

FYI, the master password you've been trying is not going to be successful, based on my experience of similar situations.