I have a friend who accidentally locked his computer's HDD, either by using password lock or some other way (he does not know).
The BIOS too was locked but I have dealt with that. Now I am supposed to work to unlock the HDD. I am using Hiren's Boot CD to unlock it. I am able to go to Unlock and it says "done" with a 0000 code for both user password or master password.
The problem is hat I am not able to issue dispwd command as it says again that the HDD has to be unlocked first to issue this command.
What did I miss or am I just faked by MHDD program? Is the HDD frozen? If so how can I unfreeze it?
Best Answer
I believe that the BIOS can (and many do) issue a "SECURITY FREEZE" command during initialization to drives that tell it not to accept further security commands.
Is this a SATA drive? Carefully attempt to connect the drive AFTER the BIOS boots up, and then see if MHDD can work on it. I think your chipset would have to support SATA hotplugging but since SATA physically supports hot swapping drives you aren't going to damage anything if you are careful (you CAN damage IDE drives doing this, though)
If that doesn't work, I'm reading here that it is suggested for issuing various security commands to drives using Linux
hdparmthat sleeping, then waking the machine does this too. Don't know if there is a way to resume MHDD (isn't it DOS based?) but you can issue unlock commands usinghdparm. This may be an alternate way to do what you are trying to do.Read the
hdparmmanpage first, and notice there's a lot of warnings. Heed all of them, and I would suggest experimenting with that command from a live CD with no other drives connected other than the one you are trying to unlock.