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unlocking travelstar 2.5" hd (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile hmmm... after i bought ibm travelstar 4.3 gb hard drive from ebay and the seller wont respond to my email and failed to tell me thatthe hd is locked i dont want to go to nortel ltd to pay !@#$%& 85.00 dollars to have it unlocked ,yep it's hdd pawword protected ,i dont care about the content of the hd ,i just want to low level format and install os for the netier ,does any1 has insider info on the inaccessable area of disk to get the protection removed the model is dkla-24320 (4gn family series) 02-09-2003 20:52:33

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) oldman Profile | Email vwbug19: ibm harddrives are now Hitachi. go to http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#Drive%20fitness and download the windows or linux diskette creator for Drive Fitness Test. read the instructions. use the progtan to create a bootable diskette that contains Drive Fitness Test. drive fitness test has an erase disk utility that writes zeros to the hard disk. be sure to follow the instructions exactly. be sure you are testing the hdd you want to fix!!! after you erase the disk, partition and format the hdd as usual and install your os. have fun oldman 02-09-2003 22:18:33

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile vwbug19, Unless someone else knows an inexpensive secret.... I believe the drive is useless. I searched for the same answer last year. I found an Ibm thinkpad model 390 P-II 300Mhz back then that had a password protected hard drive. I tried installing the HDD in several computers with no luck, No wipe, No Fdisk, No format, NADA! Finally gave up and installed a replacement motherboard and drive in the thinkpad, luckly I had both in the "great pile". BTW I still have the Thinkpad and it's running Win XP pro like a champ! 02-09-2003 22:19:20

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile Now that I remember the computers that I attempted to install the password protected drive on would not see the drive... Below is a warning I found on the web... DO NOT FORGET YOUR HARD DISK PASSWORD! Note the password and keep it in a safe place. If you forget your hard disk password, there is NO WAY TO RESET YOUR PASSWORD OR RECOVER DATA FROM THE HARD DISK. Neither an IBM authorized reseller nor IBM marketing representative can make the hard disk drive usable. 02-09-2003 22:38:14

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile yes there is one it's called master password only known to hard drive recovery techs and reading from the hard drive technical by ibm there are several functions for security feature it's called security erase prepare which is still enabled in locked disk mode and 2nd is security erase unit which requires password see the link http://ssddom01.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/85256AB8006A31E587256A7D00591FCA/$file/dkla3_ig.PDF and go to page 78(not the adobe pdf page#) read few pages down only way is to know the secret master password to security erase unit and we're home free 02-09-2003 23:06:19

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile oldman , you didn't know that an utility like drive fitness or zap will not work on locked hard drive ? i already know that method wont work see the chart on drive locked/drive unlocked/drive frozen 02-09-2003 23:08:56

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) zmoz Profile Whatever you do make sure you leave some BAAAAD feedback... 02-10-2003 00:15:17

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile i did chech his feedback history with zero negative feedback damn it ill give him his 1st negative feedback for unresponsive and failure to tell me its locked 02-10-2003 00:31:22

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile the seller's ebay user id is dimesion_buys :) 02-10-2003 00:33:26

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) redwood Profile seems reasonable... "If you forget your hard disk password, there is NO WAY TO RESET YOUR PASSWORD OR RECOVER DATA FROM THE HARD DISK. Neither an IBM authorized reseller nor IBM marketing representative can make the hard disk drive usable." but, you just want to Blitz the drive... seems like those utilities _should work? writing Zeros to the drive? I've done with with Stuborn drives.. never had a Locked one befor... Good Luck! 02-10-2003 08:14:45

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) TempestII Profile You might try looking at some of the Xbox utilities that unlock the Xbox drives from a PC. Check http://www.xboxhacker.net or http://www.xbox-scene.com 02-10-2003 09:43:46

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile the correct url for xbox tools is \ http://www.xbox-scene.com/tools/tools.php?page=harddrive i sez! more info on getting hdd unlocking came from \ http://www.xboxhacker.net/index.php?do=article&id=7&page=1 same method as ibm tech doc ill try it 02-10-2003 11:26:26

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile it look like the file named atapwd.zip is the one that does the job as used by hd expert to unlock hdd BUT gotta know the secret masterpassword by tech and another file that alows to read password requires a xbox running xbox iso 1.1 jez only function i can do without password is security erase prepare and from atapwd it sees the modes on the hd as locked, level high ,user password indicator + what i need is a pc version of password viewer to see master password 02-10-2003 12:11:44

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) mp3boombox Profile | Email its an odd ball shot, but the bios wont see the hard drive due to code in the boot sector. Ok well here is a little thought, why not load the hard drive into an external USB hard drive adapter? It will WILL load the drive as being there. though you MUST boot with the drive pluged into the computer. then try using ranish partition program and try to WIPE the drive. See the thing is is that your possably getting around the password by forcing the computer to see the drive. reason is that your bypassing the bios and using only windows software. if you use the link below there are also DOS usb drivers for loading an external usb drive. That may help you try and force a partition wip down the drives throught. I'd be willing to bet though that ranish partitioner will be your ticket with any luck. If not some one point me to the kind of software that can lock a drive and I'll try it my self on some old HD I have. As to there being NO way to WIP a drive if its passworded BS!@!@!@!@! ITS NOTHING more then around? 512bytes of CODE on the landing zone of a hard drive. WE should all know that. http://members.panax.com/bachh/ My EZnet 200 tower, hacking page. 02-10-2003 14:42:46

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) zonyl Profile I had thought the password is stored in a flash region of the controller chipset on IBM drives? Nothing to do with the MBR. 02-12-2003 05:26:41

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) Rockhammer Profile | Email Hmmm, it's a long shot, but if you can identify the flash memory chip on the drive controller board, you might be able to short the reset pin to ground and erase it (similar to clearing the cmos on a motherboard). Of course to do that you'll have to open up the drive and risk contaminating it. Of course the flash memory might contain other data besides the password, and clearing that might hose the drive permanetly. Just my $0.02. 02-12-2003 12:15:45

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) mp3boombox Profile | Email Aside from micro drives and pcmcia hard drives I HAVE NEVER hurd of the parts of a hard drive your discribing. Being located INSIDE of the drive its self. they are always on the bottem. few screws removed and a 10 conductor connecter on average. The only thing inside most hard drives for electronics is some wires and ONE chip with a few resisters. That one chip is a multiplexer i beleave. Now as to shorting a firmware chip on a hard drive. The drive HAS to have charged cmos to be wiped. If its a flash cmos hehehe TO BAD your screwed. Ibm 760 laptop's have flash cmos bios chip's. And there is NO WAY to clear the cmos period! ?why easy its flash memory not NVRAM. You seen any batters on a hard drive befor??? a cap could be used But!!!! it would have to be able to hold a charge for HOW long now? I hate to point a finger but Rockhammer is going on a whim. Find out and get me the info on what software was used to lock the drive? I'll try locking one of my old drives and see if i cant KILL the locking protection. I'm tellen ya usb adapter and any thing that can give a good RIGHT to an MBR might fix your problem. I could be worng but I bet I'm right. Hell if all else failed, a custom bios code could be written to straight out GUES what the password is. (( that is an idear )) get ahold of wildpencil. http://members.panax.com/bachh/ My EZnet 200 tower, hacking page. 02-12-2003 13:41:02

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile i have a 2nd similar hd to my 1st hd which is broken i opened the cover and i can see the platter, the heads and servo arm plus a locking lever for parking the head so it doesnt move during laptop travel and a small chip wired to board and the heads as for bios iding the hd mine can id the hd as model # and chs but locked against formatting or fdisk or disk wipe lets hack it :) 02-12-2003 14:50:27

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 1 times) Rockhammer Profile | Email Yeah, I was guessing :) but it looks like I wasn't too far off the mark, it's just a bit more complicated than I thought. Check out this website for details on the hack. http://www.ja.olm.net/unlock/ 02-12-2003 15:17:13

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) Rockhammer Profile | Email lol, maybe I should just stay out of threads that over my head. Looks like that link I posted above is just for resetting the mainboard password.... 02-12-2003 15:25:23

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 1 times) *SF* Profile http://www.ja.olm.net/unlock/ 2. Hard Drive Password -> will be available in the future. 02-12-2003 15:26:39

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile thats for owners of thinkpad with hd but not exactly for owners of hd without thinkpad and have regular pc until then ..... so eeprom is out side the hdd area i thought it was residing on hdd area? 02-12-2003 16:41:26

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Q_20423260.html Firmware....? 02-12-2003 23:17:48

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/lev2/66/lev3/68/pid/751/qid/129579 02-13-2003 04:28:48

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) piperpacer Profile vwbug19 Have you given any thought to swapping the circuit board from your boken drive? We recovered a SCSI drive once at work doing this. Long shot This idea requires that you have a desktop with two ide channels and a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter. With the secondary ide cable installed but no drives installed; Boot normally under windows; Shut down the secondary ide channel with "Swap Manager"; attach the HDD; Power up the ide channel and see what happens. The fact that the PW is probably eprom based makes this a very long shot. But the software is free to try, so what the heck! Swap Manager Link: http://softhelp.cc/vipower/swapinfo1x.html lotsa luck 02-13-2003 12:46:03

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) mp3boombox Profile | Email !!!!!? WHAT! you want him to hot plug a hard drive? thats how you kill a hard drive. give a drive bad secters in a heart beat. bad perameters in a heart beat, heck shock on contact! The lines are still going to be live even if you disable the channel. No mother board with standerd onboard IDE that i know of has hot swap tech. in it! Add on cards that is a different story. If you think that removeable hard drive caddies for IDE are hot swapable YOU are dead worng! http://members.panax.com/bachh/ My EZnet 200 tower, hacking page. 02-13-2003 15:08:14

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) mp3boombox Profile | Email Ok, here is my working point. In order to have a PW locking system on a hard drive, you have to write info to the drive which the computer will read and re-act to. Now this means that if you do this you have to have a small program written too OR hard coded to the firmware of the drive. Now considering how many different types of hard drives there are out there and different firmware. AND THE FACT THAT HARD DRIVE LOCKING IS DONE BY A PROGRAM YOU PURCHASE OR UTILE YOU ACQUIRE!!!! How do you write all the locking code to a firmware chip? the word proprietary comes to mind. So thoes of you who believe it is in the firmware chip, you tell me how?? are you going to rewrite the firmware code with a program on ANY hard drive make and model to have a lock on it? HOW ya going to do it. Hope the power doesnt go out while rewriting the firmware chip!!! AND NOT ONLY THAT but be 100% assured the drive will never fail due to temperament. Just the thought makes me think billion dollar law suite! and that number is WITH IN RANGE! Now if its a boot sector program you can do what ever you want with a locking protocol. This is why I DO NOT believe in a firmware being the offending part of the device. But if you want to prove it, get a second hard drive same make and model a just switch the controller boards on the drive. How much you want a bet it WILL NOT change a thing! Now last but not least, if it was firmware if the bios is charged cmos you cant assure with 100% certainty that the drive will retain its locked integrity. :) try and argue that one into the floor!!! Oh ya one more thing if you want to say well it can be written into the NVRAM, well is there a CALL string that will load the regester containing the little program written to lock a hard drive in the firmware, and in EVERY MAKE AND MODEL DRIVE WITH OR WITH OUT EEPROM FIRMWARE CHIPS!?!?! MOST ARE ROM only chips by the way!! This is why most old hard drives had a socketed ROM firmware chip. new drives have EEPROM SMD. 02-13-2003 15:38:09

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) Glitch Profile mp3boombox: I don't know anything about the third party solutions, but it is quite possible for IBM to do a firmware harddrive lock on the Thinkpads. IBM writes the Thinkpad BIOS. IBM writes the harddrive firmware. The last piece to this puzzle is that IBM only puts IBM drives in their computers. With control of those three pieces they can do many things. For instance, a locked harddrive will be unresponsive unless it gets the correct encrypted key from the BIOS. Only the right combination will result in a functioning drive. I don't know if one can put a Toshiba drive into a Thinkpad and use the harddrive lock feature. I researched the lock feature for our Thinkpads at work. It seems to be a very well executed from a security standpoint. In the end I chose not to use it. It was too scary for me. I've never seen anyone bypass the feature. I've seen boat loads of (well intentioned) untested suggestions on what others should try. The problem of the locked harddrive is a fairly common problem. I have a hard time believing that there is an easy solution that has been kept secret for such a long time. Some hacker would have made it public by now if such a solution existed. Glitch Electronics run on smoke, if you let the smoke out they won't work 02-13-2003 16:15:32

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile Here's more interesting reading... http://www.pwcrack.com/BIOS.SHTML 02-13-2003 17:28:58

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile Interesting, http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/02/196237&mode=thread&tid=137 02-14-2003 04:44:47

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) mp3boombox Profile | Email Glitch: I feel dumb all of a sudden, cause i was basing some of my info on just that an IBM laptop :) that and I have one. But I never put 2 and 2 togeather, relating to the drive that started this post being an IBM drive. Being IBM any thing is possable. But I know ibm can unlock drives cause I got a friend who use to work for IBM. He said that there was an area that did referb to drives so they could re-sell the drives. He also told me he never botherd to ask how cause it wasnt inprotant to him at the time. He was in sales anyways. So in anycase this much is known for shure, a locked drive is TOTALY drive based! all the LOCKING code is stored in IN the drive. Be it platter or be it firmware, or both its in the drive only. My gues has changed from enlightment of IBM to the point of. Ibm drives have flash cmos so that means to clear them you MUST add power. a speical combo of ? jumbers maby IDE pins??? or hidden jumpers on the board maby as resister pads? There may be a back door code as well. 02-16-2003 15:05:25

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) Ragnar1 Profile My brother game my dad a thinkpad 380. It worked for a week and then the motherboard died. I tried the 380 hard drive both in a thinkpad 770 and thinkpad 760. Neither would recognize the 380 drive. But my iopener does recognize the drive. I have Mandrake on it. Haven't yet tried it in the 760 or 770 since putting mandy on it. Anyway, if you have a choice, don't buy any IBM drives. They are a pain in the butt. And tend to run hotter than my toshiba drives. Heat kills. 02-17-2003 22:55:32

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) browcat Profile http://www.spectrumwest.com/Attach2.htm this may or may not be of any help.....since you cant get it to work anyway what have you got to lose...if you try and it works let us know 02-23-2003 17:32:57

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) sarcosis Profile did you try this YOU MUST SUPPLY POWER TO THE HDD THEN SHORT OUT J11 J15 SHUT DOWN AND FDISK THEN FORMAT AND YOUR READFY TO GO [computing.net] \ http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/3542.html 06-04-2003 18:32:39

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) *SF* Profile http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/3542.html the Space Broke the Code 06-04-2003 19:24:16

RE:unlocking travelstar 2.5 (modified 0 times) vwbug19 Profile BEEN THERE BEFORE no helping ,and where is the j11 and j15 on the hd???? 06-05-2003 04:19:19

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