How to disable password on a hard drive?

[Jokerman28]

I bought a 10 Gig Seagate ST310211A thinking I got a good deal and now I know why... I can't even partition the drive in Partition Magic. Drive errors. I finally ran a Seagate tools diagnostic and found out that the drive is password protected.

How do you disable the password? or is there a way to reset the drive? Thanks.

 

[micker377]

What does Fdisk see?

 

[wolluf]

thread751-722651 suggests your drive might be effectively a doorstop. You could try running

http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm

on it.

 

[micker377]

I use a 10 line debug program to put hard drives back to factory fresh.

 

[Jokerman28]

Fdisk can't even access the drive: Error reading fixed disk

wolluf: Thanks for the killdisk tool. I can't use it until I figure out a way to kake the disk readable by the OS.

I'm going to try and add it to another working system as a slave drive and see if I can at least fdisk it with partition magic.

 

[edfair]

fdisk /mbr will sometimes work with these but not always.

Micker,
Suspect that this is the debug driven zero fill script that has been floating around for a long time. But there is no cross reference to it on this forum. How about adding it as a FAQ?

This is one spot that I would suspect that a hot connect would work, use one drive as the boot up recognition device, then swap the data cable to the bad one, then run fdisk /mbr. The lockout has to be the equivalent of a boot sector virus. But no swap of the power cable, have both powered up, just data cable on a good one at boot and swapped across to the other to run the fdisk. And this with DOS on a floppy so there is no live HD updates in process.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[wolluf]

Jokerman28 - you can create a bootable floppy of killdisk - don't need operating system -

http://download2.lsoft.net/killdiskfloppysetup.exe

 

[micker377]

Strange it's not here - this is where I got it (last year!)
**********************************************************

CAUTION: Use this at your own risk (desperation). It will totally erase your harddrive, with no way to restore.

DOS boot disk with at least Debug, Fdisk, and Format on it (Win98 Emergency Boot Disk has it all).
Boot to A: prompt - type DEBUG. a "-" will appear, start typing, and hit <enter> after each line.

The x's are for reference only, do not type. The rest of "Address" will appear on it's own.

Addresses What you type
--------- -------------
F 200 L1000 0 (ZEROS)
A CS:100
xxxx:0100 MOV AX,0301
xxxx:0103 MOV BX,0200
xxxx:0106 MOV CX,0001
xxxx:0109 MOV DX,0080
xxxx:010C INT 13
xxxx:010E INT 20
xxxx:0110 <ENTER> (Just hit enter key)
G
Q


The "G" means GO, and it should give a message like "program terminated normally" (This is from the original instructions, it may be too fast to read on new systems).
The "Q" means Quit, and should return you to the A: prompt.
Note: if you try to access the hard drive at this time, you should get a "Drive not ready" error. Re-boot the DOS disk, partition and format the usual way.
*********************************************************

<<<<<<<<<Remember - proceed at your own risk>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

[Jokerman28]

Thanks wolluf, I did use the bootdisk, but the drive was not being recognized at all to start with. It looks like the drive is shot. I shook it a little and I heard some noise, not good. I'm going to junk it and move on. I appreciate everyone's responses.