Samantha_14 wrote:
A very relieved update:
The Dell I was using didn't like the locked HDD in Sata 02, so b4 I abandoned using a Dell at all, I tried putting the locked HDD in Sata 00 (master), and at that point, HDAT2 4.5.3 was able to see it, before all it saw was the other sata 00 but not my locked drive in sata 02, although it still did not see the slave I put in Sata 02.
First, turns out 0 is not hex 00 in keyboard scan codes or the ascii equivalent. Whereas R was hex 13 in scancode world, in non-scancode world, R is hex 52 while r is hex 72. I found this out using Hdat2 4.5.3. Although it would show me the Hex equivalent, I couldn't actually input in hex in that version, from what I read, I needed 4.7 or higher. I was going to need a higher version since some of the hex I needed were not going to be available using the keyboard as far as I could tell, especially 00 and DC3, etc.
I dl'ed HDAT2 4.9.x and burned the iso to a CD, and booted from that. HDAT2 4.9.x was diff right away in that it saw both my locked drive in Sata 00 but also the other drive in Sata 02. There I found the Hex mode, it was a little kludgy as far as inputting them went, you couldn't just input them all at once, you had to input 1, have it accept, go back into hex mode, remove the previous value using backspace, right arrow, backspace, then re-enter another, have it accept, etc. If you wanted to update the Hex string, you had to hit enter. Once you verified your string was building correctly, when you went back into the password, it would throw you to the end of the string, so you had to space back over, etc.
At any rate, I got my string inputed exactly as the 22.bin file showed, hit enter, and rather anti-climatically, it told me that the command was successful! Since I did Unlock vs Unlock Device, I also had to Disable Password, and that was just a Y/N challenge response. It worked.
Next thing was to change the HDD's back to their original order so I could boot using my unlocked laptop HDD as a slave for easy copying purposes, and then to change the bios boot options sequence to SATA 1st as opposed to CD/DVD first.
Once booted, I went into Disk management, and my drive was being read and my drive letters were assigned. I went out to one of the drive letters of the unlocked HDD and opened a file. What a relief!
I've since hooked up my External USB HDD, and I'm copying my data to it as a backup.
I'm so thrilled to have my data of over 5 years back and being backed up. I'm definitely going to be purchasing some form of NAS with Raid 2 and begin backing up my home drives periodically.
Thanks to everyone!
sam
Thanks for this post. I had a similar problem as you described. Mhdd worked as instructed in this thread and confirmed the hard drive password was what I thought it was. However, I was unable to get the hard drive to accept the password by typing it at the computer startup prompt or using it in the unlock option in mhdd. The hard drive came out of a different laptop that also had a computer startup password on it, in addition to the hard drive having its own password. The owner opted for maximum startup security. Anyway, after realizing I could not simply type in the correct password (or use the alt key input method) I tried HDAT2 as you described here. I input the hex version exactly as shown in my 22.bin file and it worked instantly. Thanks again for pointing me to this tool. It was the final step I required.
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HDDGURU FILES
unless you can remember the password
See my thread above.
