Locked hard drive.

J

Joey45Percent

n00b
Joined
Mar 23, 2005
Messages
4
Hi guys.. I know this is going to sound really n00b, but man, I'm stumped.

I was fooling around with some hard drive tools, and I locked my Samsung 160GB EIDE PATA hard drive. The password I set was "freebird". But for some reason, I cannot UNLOCK this drive, and it has been rendered useless. Its driving me crazy... so can ANYONE help?
 
Google it. Sounds like the kind of thing someone would've made a ramdisk linux bootdisk for.
 
no i mean what did you use to lock it? Was it in Windows or what. And what piece of software did you use?
 
I'm not sure, but since the xbox locks the drive using the ATA security set, you've probably locked it at that level.

Knowing the password, you're already better off than me - I had a device write random garbage to the password an expensive 2.5" drive. That was 3 years ago. I'm still trying to find a way past it.

Check out: http://www.rockbox.org/lock.html for a tool and some info that may help. Find out whether the xbox sets the master password or the user password. Read up about the security functions, because making a few wrong moves could put you in my situation, and you don't want to be here :).

This place http://a-ff.com/products/rrs/drives/ has a utility they say breaks the password (by brute force I assume), but the price starts at $65, for which (3 years later) I could get a similar drive on ebay. I already tried a low level format, so my data is gone, so the value of the hardware is the only value left in the equation.

My advice would once you have CONFIRMED that you are dealing with ata-locked drive, and you know WHICH password was set, try to intelligently brute-force it using the utility at the rockbox site - guess all the spelling mistakes you could have made, all the capslock possibilities, etc etc. This will take time, as the drive may be set to require a powerdon after 5 password attempts.

A quick overview: If it is indeed locked using the ATA security spec then the usual advice (when you don't have the password) is "your drive is now a paperweight", but if you are tenacious (or you have the password, as you think you do)

1. Formatting, fdisk, low-level formats, etc are all useless. I suggest "don't bother".
2. Replacing the circuitry is probably useless (the password is usually stored on the platter, but not in an area that even a low-level format reaches, it's alongside calibration data essential to basic drive operation - degauss it, and the drive can no-longer operate even though the password is gone.
3. If you set the user password, and the data is not important to you, try to find the default master password for your drive model. This will not allow recovery of data, but can allow a reset that wipes all data, thus enabling the hardware to be used again.
4. There is apparently hardware that can sniff the password. While expensive, if the data is valuable it might be worth looking into (or sending it to a forensics company)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top