Unlocking HDD that was locked with ATA password?

Factual Questions
1

I have a laptop from a company clearance. The HDD was formatted before it was given to me, but now as I try to install Windows I realize that they have set an ATA password on the HDD.

After some googling I found that it is possible to remove the password using the Linux HDPARM command. I am using an Ubuntu live CD, but my problem is that I cannot find the HDD. An entry is visible in \dev\disk\by-id but I can’t mount it

Is there any other way to get rid of the password? The drive is empty so I don’t care about data loss.

2

DBAN.
Or hit enter when the password prompt appears in case they set a blank password.
Or go into BIOS and look around for a password field in there and change it…

3

  1. Do you have a bootable CD or Utility Disk to the operating system you plan to load the sys with? If so, set the cmos/setup (by pressing F1, F2, Etc seen while the screen is coming up) to boot from the cd 1st and it should give you the option to format the old HDD before loading you new sys.

  2. If all fail to boot from a CD rem the HDD and set it as a slave working with an operating system and format the HDD.

  3. You might just get the Geek Squad or Etc with a Utility Disk or workbench Computer to format the HDD if you are not setup.

4

I know, just reformat! :rolleyes:

What model is the drive?

5

ATA level passwords are stored in the controller hardware. It won’t let you format the drive without the password, and even if you could it would be pointless. The password isn’t stored in the formatable part of the HDD.

6

You don’t want to mount the drive, you want to point hdparm at it and run a command. The disk is most likely /dev/sda If a USB memory stick or an SDCard or somesuch is plugged in, then it is possible that those are /dev/sda and the disk is /dev/sdb or c, but for a laptop /dev/sda is by far the best guess.

I haven’t read up on the topic, just glanced at the hdparm man page, so it’s possible I’ve got the wrong argument to hdparm, but it looks like you just need to run “hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sda” to clear the password. You will have to do that as root, so “sudo hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sda” is probably the complete command you want. You might have to look at the Ubuntu live documentation to see what password (if any) sudo expects you to provide. On a typical system, running sudo will ask for your password, but it’s possible the live CD is not set to ask for any password for sudo. I’m just trying to be clear, that if you run the “sudo hdparm…” command it’s not asking for the password to the hard disk. It’s possible Ubuntu live wants you to do something else to get root privileges.

7

Echoreply, I eventually had to use the full id under /dev/disk/by-id/, because the drive isn’t listed anywhere else.

However, running the command or variations of it gives


SECURITY_ERASE: Input/output error
8

If you run “ls -l” in the /dev/disk/by-id/ directory you should see that the name of the disk is linked to ../../sda It doesn’t matter if you use /dev/sda or /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA… As long as hdparm is pointed at the correct thing. I’ve never done anything with passwords in hard disks, so I don’t have any other advice if you’re doing everything correctly, and it’s not working.

Worst case, you can get a new laptop hard disk for $50.

9

I tried some other options with the hdparm command and it seems it can otherwise interact just fine with the drive. It cannot remove the password though.

I ended up buying a new drive. That’s ok though, the old one was a tiny 80gb, the new one is 320gb :slight_smile: