Locked out of HDD

[Basil Chupin]

On 29/05/11 15:59, Pritam Baral wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In short:
> My hdd is locked, but my bios doesnt let me unlock it, cant boot from
> live-iso because it gets stuck at the poimt of identifying hdd. Any
> way of passing a boot parameter to unlock the hdd first?
>
> In detail:
> Firstly, this is not one of those situations where one forgets their
> hdd password. I know my password, I just cant unlock it.
>
> My hdd supports the Security Mode Feature Set, though it was not
> enabled before. My bios doesn't let me set the hdd password.


If your BIOS doesn't allow you to set the password, how then did you set it?


>   Somewhere
> on another forum


Ah, the forums.... great experts lurk in them there forums......



>   I had read that if the hdd password is set, the bios
> would ask me for the hdd password. So, I tried setting the hdd
> passwords through hdparm. I noticed that my bios sends a
> SECURITY_FREEZE at every power-on; unfreezing is easy: sleep and wake.
>
> So, I successfully set the passwords(both master and user) only to
> discover that my bios doesn't ask for the hdd password!
>
> So I booted from a Lucid Lynx live iso on my pendrive, but it stops
> during the boot spewing endless error messages about ata1.00 so fast
> that i can't even read them! I know the password, is there any way to
> send the SECURITY_UNLOCK command during the boot process, probably
> through a kernel boot parameter?

One, as I already asked, what did you use to set such a password?

Two, what's the brand of the HDD, and what happens if you use the disc 
utility from the manufacturer for this brand of HDD?

And three, never having set any such passwords on my HDDs, if the data 
on the HDD is replaceable, can you do a low level format on it - 
provided this security-thingie will allow you, that is? (I suspect not 
because the whole idea of a password is to stop anyone accessing the 
HDD. But one never knows.....)

Oh, four: have you searched the net for this self-created problem?

BC

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