Hello gurus,

I recently used Dmitry's MHDD software with a script from this forum to repair a locked 2.5" WD "Scorpio" notebook disk that could not boot - the user set the password in BIOS, but then forgot it.

The owner was told that the locked HDD was a throw-away, was sold a new one, and told to reinstall everything. However there was no system restore CD/DVD with his machine, and when I tried to get one the Acer support person I spoke to said it wouldn't work anyway with a new hard disk, because "the restore CD relied on a hidden partition on the factory installed disk". I'm not sure if this information is correct; when I unlocked it, here was a second partition on the disk but it was almost empty and not hidden anyway.

When I extracted the disk sectors and located the master password, the user did not recognise it, because it was a trade name that the (German) user would never have typed. It seems that the BIOS sets a different password on the disk than what is typed, or perhaps sets the typed password as a user password and its own password as a master password. This would explain why Acer can quote a fixed charge for repairing this issue.

The master password was "h2oinsyde" which is apparently the company name of the maker of the Acer 7720G BIOS. Note that because the BIOS password may differ from the disk password, the notebook may not accept this password at the boot screen - you will probably need to use MHDD to unlock the disk.

I am posting my results as a thank you to Dmitry for his MHDD tool, and in the hope that it proves useful to anyone with an unbootable Acer notebook - and who can't get a restore disk from Acer, or does not want to send it to another country for a simple fix.

HTH

MM

That's not the first person to have posted with a hard drive that randomly became locked with "h2oinsyde"... interesting.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Dear midman,

I'd very much like to get in touch with you about this theory.

I just bought an Acer Aspire V3 571G. I use self-encrypting Intel 520 SSDs, so it's crucially important that the ATA master and user passwords are correctly set.

Because I know that Acer does something silly to the passwords, and I really don't want the Acer backdoors to work, I configured both the ATA master and user passwords on a different machine with the ATASX BIOS extensions. I was hoping that although the Acer might mangle the passwords at configuration, it might pass them through at bootup if they are already configured in the drive.

No such luck. I checked and double checked: When I supply the exact same ATA user password that I configured on the other machine when the Acer asks me at bootup, the Acer claims that the password is incorrect. Seems like more proof that what you give to the Acer BIOS, is not exactly what it passes through to the HDD.

I would really like to know what exactly the Acer BIOS does to the passwords. We suspect that it configures a master password of "h2oinsyde" (doh). I'd also like to know what it sets as the user password.

No thank you. I deliberately buy Intel 520s and use them all over due to the built-in hardware encryption. Third-party encryption such as Truecrypt (which I do use occasionally) and LUKS with dm-crypt on Linux (which I use extensively on spindle drives) are bad for the wear-levelling and the performance of SSDs.

I would prefer spending more time getting this Acer BIOS to behave, i.e. keep my pre-configured master and user passwords, and just allow me to enter the user password at bootup.

Acer is a very popular brand of laptop sold here on the islands. I had 4 come in that had this happen to them. They had both the BIOS and HDD PW set and one day they could no longer access their laptop. To pass the BIOS PW this one was fine but when they typed in their HDD PW it would not accept. This is interesting thanks for posting this one. Wonder what ACER is doing to the HDD PW interesting.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Midman, my son was playing around on his computer and somehow locked himself out. He has an Acer 5349 and we are getting Harddisk Security HDD WDC WD5000BVT-22HXZLock. Help!

It looks like he set the HDD password.

If it's a modern Acer laptop with the Insyde H2O BIOS, simply press enter, then enter an incorrect password three times, after which it will ask you to enter an unlock code. Press enter on that, then take the numeric code it gives you there and enter it at this site: http://www.allservice.ro/acer/

The site will give you a new master password with which you can unlock the hard drive.