Here’s a guide for (). These passwords are stored in a special area of the hard disk that also contains the firmware for the device. Normally you can’t get at them but [Supersonic] walks us through a method used to grab the data off of a Western Digital Scorpio drive.

Booting into a program called MHDD you are able to bypass the BIOS (which won’t allow you to read protected data) and directly drive the SATA or PATA controller on your motherboard. Once you’ve dumped the data it can be viewed with a HEX editor, and if you know where to look you can grab the passwords that are locking the disk.

Jul 31, 2012. METHOD #1 Do search with Bing for atapwd or 'ata password' its part of the new ATA spec. You can enter a 'master password' that will remove the 'user password' that has be setup on the drive. This master password is manufacturer specific. So search your hard drive manufacturers website for Bing.

This reminds us of some of the original Xbox hacks which used a variety of methods to unlock the stock hard disk. Posted in Tagged,,, Post navigation. Solidsquad Solidworks 2014 Crack on this page. Yeah, that reminds me of Xbox too. Reminds me of when I unlocked the disk, and then didn’t write down the password that it needed to be relocked with. I was told I either needed to sniff the PW from the IDE bus directly (in plaintext) or buy a mod chip. I didn’t have a logic analyzer at that point so I had to buy a mod chip.

This also reminds me of a discussion I had with flyback, a freenode regular, on IRC recently. He was doing some data recovery for a client on a faulty HDD. Flyback was using a serial debug interface that he said was common amongst HDD’s. It sounded like you just needed to know what test points to solder to and the protocol was straightforward after that. You could do some really low level stuff with the hardware. You also got r/w access to all kinds of eeprom data.

I’ll bet the password was in there. He gave me a PDF with an extensive list of serial commands, but I lost it when I had to reinstall my OS a couple weeks ago. He called it PMOS. I’m not sure what that refers to, and googling “PMOS” doesn’t bring up anything relevant. It was really interesting, and worth some digging if anyone’s into HDD tech or is technically inclined and desparate to salvage some data from a bad HDD.

That site blocks us from seeing some of the WD info, sadly. Luckily, I’m working on a Fujitsu! (Hehe) I came across this in a search for a tool that actually works on resetting the password on/erasing a drive that got it accidentally set. I just love how laptops with one set will just go ahead and make unlocked drives protected without asking – don’t you, too? LOL, probably someone at the store ‘tested’ a laptop with it and then I bought it.

It’s more fun getting it working than walking back to the store, though. I’ve learned that the Fujitsu laptop drives have pins suspiciously similar in placement to the ones on the Seagate 7200.11 drives that everyone was griping about a couple years back. Luckily, mine was unaffected by the BSY bug.:/ BTW You should have linked to this part of your forum.