I'm trying to recover the contents of a WD1600BEVS-26VATO hard drive that came out of a Toshiba Satellite from ~2009 ish that's locked with an unknown ATA password set by my mother many years back. Victoria HDD shows the status as "ON, High, Locked", connecting the drive via SATA to a PC from the era just asks for the ATA password and I'm unsure how to proceed.

Wiping the drive is not an option and neither is professional data recovery services. Any and all advice would be helpful.

Thanks in advance

Some older WD drives respond to manufacturer backdoor passwords:
Try entering:
WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD (32 characters)
NULL (all zeros)
SEAGATE (some WD drives respond to this)

If successful, the drive should unlock in read-only mode (allowing data recovery).

Read the SA modules with WDMarvel demo version or HDDSuperTool. The password will be in module 02.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

These passwords are only suitable for erasing the user password together with erasing the user data!!!
And SEAGATE is supplemented with spaces up to 32 characters.

Dumped the modules of two drives to compare, turns out in the module where the password is on the target drive, the password is filled with just random bytes seemingly (possibly from when it was taken in for recovery before, though the data they sent back's since been lost)

Attached a screenshot of the module where the password *should* be, it's for some reason random bytes (i've compared it against another drive of the same type and in that one it's plaintext so i'm not sure what this is, could be from the time I took it in for professional recovery, but the data they sent back is long gone)

The password is BENJAMIN. It is encoded as keyboard scan codes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230729195153/http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/MSKeyLog.TXT

You need to carve out those scan codes, plus the additional 0x00 bytes, and then feed the 32-byte string to a tool like Victoria in the form of a file. Or you could use hdparm and supply the 32 hex codes. You can't use "BENJAMIN" directly, unless you attach the drive to a computer with a compatible BIOS.

About Passwords ...

https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?p=1620#p1620

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

What would be the process of doing this? The machine I'm working with is a Dell Optiplex from ~2009 ish, though the drive came from a Toshiba Satellite of the same era. Would the best course of action be to buy a Satellite used and unlock it with that or?

Update: got the data off the disk, thanks for everyone's help