Hi guys well the story goes like this i bought a Acer travelmate from a second hand shop for £50 which was a good bargain and there 5 more like this if any one need 1 you can get them from cash converters in manchester well thats not my story the gamble was it had no power adapter and sold as seen and no return so i figured well as a person with computer tech knoledge what would be a problem with this laptop i can fix and i was wrong first thing i did wen i reached home was use a universal adapter which i had then power it up guess what all was working and beatyfull now the story gets interesting while browsing the ol big gate xp home edition i started getting a knocking sound which sounded like the hdd has problems so i decided to format it an use a good until so called hdd regenerator 1.51 and guess what it removed a bad sector on the first block after that i restarted it asked me for a hdd password well i never asked me before only wen i formated it. So i started googleing it and found out about hdd security on 2.5" hdds now am stuck i also got the atapwds victoria and other utils i got from the net nothing worked. so i thought to get another hdd thinking its simple throw the hdd which came with the latp top and get another used 40gb hdd that alwo got locked now i got 2 hdds locked and looking for a solution


any help guys thank you another thing any idea what a master password is coz most of the utils ask for that

If your drive is knocking, you would be well advised to replace it. Mobile drives are cheap now, as is the peace of mind . . .

Jon

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Is there a Password to access the BIOS? With Laptops, if you set a BIOS Password, it may set a HD password as well.

Are you able to enter the bios and save changes?
What is the exact model of your acer?
There are ways to generate a master password depending on the model.

hi guys thanks for the posts

dick yes i can access my bios and its an ACER travelmate 2300

rchadwick no the Bios password is disabled and the password settings for the bios and HDD are separate

jono i have another HDD i bought and it locked that one too and the knocking sound isnt a bad HDD if i listen carefully it actually parks the head if the password is wrong

rchadwick also if i remove the hdd and access the bois the option to reset or set the hdd PWD is not showing up on the bios

dick i can access the bios and can do everthing except reseting the HDD PWD

Have you made sure you have no Passwords set whatsoever in the BIOS?

110% no password on bios only HDD and if i move the HDD on another laptop i have a fujitsu it still asks for a PWD the strange thing is the bios locks any HDD i fix on it and i have done my research its a firmware security all i need is a master password to try it out because all the UTILs iv got asks for a master password to unlock it the UTILS iv used are atapwd, UHDD, and victoria

@mbba

I have sent you a pm.