If I were you I would take the drive to the police and enquire as to whether it has been reported as stolen. If the password is the name of the owner, then "N. Kassem" may be on their records.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

No it's not stolen. I talked to the guy he does computer repairs and takes parts in return for work. He says it was traded with various rams sticks and a monitor for work done to that guys desktop computer. I guess he was paid in cash and parts, he says he gets a lot like that these days, people trying to save money wherever possible. He says that he can guarantee is not stolen but that it might have come out of an xbox 360 possibly as he repairs those as well. I have bought many used hard drives and none have been stolen. Also I just talked to my buddy that is on duty a local cop where I live and it is clean. They have nothing on file for any WD drives nor laptops that have that name linked to them, if it actually is a name. He had them run the serial number to be sure and they did put it on file just incase something ever develops but he says nothing ever comes along with hard drives, they just get destroyed before an item gets put into auction so you have to buy one for a laptop if buy from their auction anyways.

I wonder how many people know by heart serial number of the drive in their laptops

The KASSEMN password is correct, if you type it when the drive is in the original laptop of course

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

How do we know that the hard drive came from a laptop and not an xbox 360 or external enclosure? So is the only way to enter the password by putting it into the original enclosure whatever it may have been or is there another way to do it? If there is no way of doing it then I'm just going to bring it back to the repair guy. So how would people go about getting into a drive if their laptop broke say motherboard fried? There has to be some way to unlock it and format this thing. Will DBAN work? Yeah I know the password is KASSEMN but that still doesn't help me if I have no way of typing it in?

So many questions...

Well when I have lots of free time I might add ASCII to scan code conversion and add unlock feature to HDDScan but I don't know when it might happen or if it ever happens

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

As you managed to dump the 22.bin then you must have read at least some of what has really become the 'Unlocking WD for Dummies' thread. It contains everything you need to know on how to unlock your WD drive!

So basically your saying without the original device it was in whatever it was there is NO way of entering the password into it to unlock it. Or am I wrong here? If this is true I'm bringing it back to him. He says it's pretty easy to do according to him, but maybe he thinks it's something else. I told him that when trying to initialize it, it gives me crc error or device not accessible.

Then let him do it. It's not fare to sell locked (unusable) drive.

That's what I'm talking about, but like I said maybe he thinks it's a different problem. I'd gladly do the work if it's possible to format this thing I'm not a noobie, but this by far the hardest drive I've ever had to fix that was supposed to be tested and working.

AIUI, an Xbox hack changes the model number, serial number, firmware version, and capacity. Since the serial number has remained unchanged, then it would appear that the drive was hacked for some other reason.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Well I'm bringing it to him tomorrow night and he says he will unlock it for me no problem? What does he have or know that we don't on this forum? I'm gonna pay attention to what software he uses to unlock it and how he does it within windows or dos or whatever and or if he uses any hardware to accomplish this as no one on here seems to be able to shed some light on the situation.

Nothing. Many readers of the forum know how to unlock it, but that's not the only problem. The drive appears to have been tampered with in other ways that we can't easily guess remotely (it has a 320GB drive sticker and serial number, yet firmware reports a 120GB model), so even after unlocking, you will have some sort of "franken-drive".

I'm guessing that this reason (i.e. any time spent explaining unlocking the drive may be a waste of time, as it has had its firmware tampered with) and concerns over unlocking a drive with a password for someone who didn't put that password onto the drive, may explain why you aren't getting more replies. That's just a guess - YMMV.

Yeah he tried to use dban to write zero's to it that didn't happen, I already tried that too. And then tried to use atapwd which I also tried it didn't even run at all in msdos. He was like I've used this software on companies computers with no problem, and yet didn't do anything just errors when trying to get in the drive when dban ran same as I did, he told me I didn't run it right and guess what didn't work for him. Anyways he is going to try a few other things to it to see if he can get it back but for now cash back.

Yeah I just ended up getting a trade in on that drive and he got me a 320gb hitachi this time as a replacement for the same as what I had paid before. 15 seconds and I was up and running. My PS3 and me are so much happier now. Thanks for your efforts guys. He still claims he is going to unlock that drive just to see if it's possible. He says if he can't do it he will have some fun with it.