[kruelmind]

Good evening gents,

I've a friend of mine who has a mischievous kid that set a Hard Drive Password (via bios) to where he can no longer even boot his drive without that password.

My research has lead me to find that the password is stored on the HPA (Host Protected Area) of the hard drive, where the firmware is stored. What I have read is that you need to boot a program to bypass the BIOS and talk directly to the controller in order to view the HPA.

Is anyone familiar with the process of recovering a hard drive password? If not password recovery, I would even be interested in knowing a way to reset this password so he can get on with using his machine and not have to buy a new drive.

Before any suggestions are made; reformatting does not work, switching circuit boards does not work, and putting it in a different machine does not work. This is something written to the platter itself that is not accessible through a standard Operating System.

Thanks to all who lend a helping hand,
Kruelmind

[kruelmind]

Update/bump:

Anybody know of anything? Everything I've been reading leads me to believe that the HPA is going to be in a different location for every different manufacturer of HDD, as well as in a different area for every SIZE of that particular HDD. I know it to be possible to be done, just a very tedious/time consuming task the first crack of each specific drive. How difficult would it be to create a psuedo-OS that lets you read entire disk of any drive (including HPA)? Any thoughts?

[kruelmind]

Update/bump:

Anybody know of anything? Everything I've been reading leads me to believe that the HPA is going to be in a different location for every different manufacturer of HDD, as well as in a different area for every SIZE of that particular HDD. I know it to be possible to be done, just a very tedious/time consuming task the first crack of each specific drive. How difficult would it be to create a psuedo-OS that lets you read entire disk of any drive (including HPA)? Any thoughts?