Recent content by fzabkar

Try a secure erase. http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/secure-erase.html

Do you know the password? Did you password protect your drive? Sometimes a drive will report that it is security locked when it is in fact faulty.

Could we see the actual SMART data?

Put your trust in HD Sentinel. Many SMART utilities don't understand Seagate's counterintuitive attributes. In general, the raw values of the Seek Error Rate and Raw Read Error Rate attributes are sector counts, not error counts. See http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Seagate_SER_RRER_HEC.html

See http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=570&p=1408 ... or try ZU.

Is it possible that the no-password machine keeps a record of your password and automatically unlocks your drive ??? You could test this idea by changing the password using one of the other machines.

It appears that you may have an Acer laptop. If so, then you would need to supply the key to Acer Tech Support. They have a tool to unlock your laptop. It does this by using the key to generate the original password. See http://www.allservice.ro/acer/

Try an ATA Secure Erase: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/hughes/SecureErase.html

Sorry, this is it: http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

If the drives' master password has not been changed from its factory default, then an ATA Secure Erase should recover the drive. http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtm

If your data is of no value, and if the master password is still at its default factory setting, then an ATA Secure Erase will recover your drive. See http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml ... and http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/HDDEraseReadMe.txt

Do you know the password? If so, then you can use Victoria for Windows to setup and answer a password challenge. If the password was set via BIOS, then be aware that it will be encoded using keyboard scan codes rather than ASCII characters. For example, the ASCII values (in hexadecimal) of...

How does a utility such as HDAT2 or HDDScan report the security status of the drives? If it is reported as "locked", then the drives have an ATA password. I believe this is written to the Vendor Track in the hidden System Area on the platters. In this case you could use a paid solution such as...