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Hard Disk Password (IBM/Hitachi DeskStar)

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First post, by obobskivich

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Okay - was tinkering with my Pentium 4 tonight, getting read to load an OS on it and move to re-casing, and figured I'd do some diagnostics on the hard-drives just to be safe (Good thing I did - caught one that's bad, and replaced it). Anyways - the primary drive, a Hitachi IC35L060AVV207-0 seems to have "locked" itself for no ostensible reason; it was running the IBM Fitness test, I restarted and was going to wipe the MBR to install my OS, and I get "cannot read/write, disk password set - security maximum!" (and here's the kicker - Fitness Test won't run if that was true, which means it magically (unless someone has a better explanation) did this by itself). The system never asks for a password during boot-up and the BIOS is fine to view the drive, change DMA settings, enable/disable SMART, but it annoys me that this drive is "locked" for no good reason! (There is no password set by the BIOS - it is unlocked). And yes this is a real question - I know, by all laws of science this is technically impossible; but remember we're dealing with a DeskStar after all.... 😵

How do I murder this setting with extreme prejudice? (I'm not paying for some "shareware try and buy" noise)

If there's no easy solution we'll move to murder the drive with extreme prejudice. 😈 (I have a very large selection of very large tools for this job...)

Blargh!

Reply 1 of 2, by Zup

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I remember that MHDD can alter some of those settings, but if you "unlock" that HDD maybe the contents are gone. I guess you could use other utilities, look into Hiren's Boot CD or Ultimate Boot CD. Those CDs have plenty of utils, and maybe one of them can unset that protection.

Maybe that behaviour is caused by some corruption of the drive so even if you unlock the disk, it is not advisable to continue using it for valuable data (or any data).

And please, dont destroy that drive... it has some very powerful magnets that you can use (and you could made shurikens from platters, also).

I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...

I'm selling some stuff!

Reply 2 of 2, by obobskivich

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Zup wrote:

I remember that MHDD can alter some of those settings, but if you "unlock" that HDD maybe the contents are gone. I guess you could use other utilities, look into Hiren's Boot CD or Ultimate Boot CD. Those CDs have plenty of utils, and maybe one of them can unset that protection.

Maybe that behaviour is caused by some corruption of the drive so even if you unlock the disk, it is not advisable to continue using it for valuable data (or any data).

And please, dont destroy that drive... it has some very powerful magnets that you can use (and you could made shurikens from platters, also).

Checked on UBCD - both of the IBM/Hitachi utilities just say its locked and turn it away. The Samsung utility would start up for me (system has a Samsung drive too) but it won't attempt to unlock it. Found an MHDD guide, but not for IBM/Hitachi - apparently the information is stored differently depending on who made the drive, so what will work for WD (seems to be the most popular for guides) may not work for the IBM.

I'm guessing you're probably right on the behavior being corruption - last I knew (~six months ago) the drive was perfectly fine, and started up Windows on the machine without a hiccup; and it wasn't able to successfully boot that in a few attempts. From further reading about "ATA passwords" it also appears the password cannot (or should not) ever be set by the manufacturer, and if it were "correctly" set it would behave like my laptop - it wouldn't boot up unless a password was provided, or the drive was disconnected. So I'm guessing that there isn't a "password" so much as something is borked. 🙁

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