Locked out of HDD

[Nils Kassube]

Ric Moore wrote:
> God only knows why they released
> hdparm with that enabled. 

Why not? Some people may have a need for the faeture. And there are 
other dangerous tools coming with every OS. If you use that feature you 
should know it is dangerous because it is mentioned several times in the 
man page:

| ATA Security Feature Set
| 
|  These switches are DANGEROUS  to experiment with, and might not work
|  with some kernels. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.  
[...]
| --security-set-pass PWD  
|  Lock the drive, using password PWD (Set Password) (DANGEROUS). 
|  Password is given as an ASCII string and is padded with NULs to reach
|  32 bytes. Use the special password NULL  to set an empty password.
|  The applicable drive password is selected with the --user-master
|  switch (default is "user" password) and the applicable security mode
|  with the --security-mode switch. No other options are permitted on
|  the command line with this one. 
[...]
| THIS FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT WELL TESTED. USE AT YOUR OWN
| RISK. 

And if you don't look at man pages but rely on the --help option to the 
program to discover interesting features, it is mentioned as well:

| ~/ > hdparm --security-help
| 
| ATA Security Commands:
|  Most of these are VERY DANGEROUS and can destroy all of your data!
|  Due to bugs in older Linux kernels, use of these commands may even
|  trigger kernel segfaults or worse.  EXPERIMENT AT YOUR OWN RISK!

How many more warnings do you need?

@Pritam Baral:

If NoOps suggestion to use hdparm commands with grub doesn't work, you 
could put the drive in a USB disk enclosure and connect it after the 
system is running. Maybe that avoids the error messages during startup 
and you have a chance to issue your unlock command.


Nils