Hardware

Most likely the unit he is speaking of is a Dell Laptop, or other manf. who has a HD password lock setting in BIOS.

My searches over the years have not found any aftermarket software that can remove the lock.
Dell used to give its certified techs access to a couple of in-house tools that can unlock the drive... but the only ones Ive seen floating around only work on older units and are based on the serial number of the unit or the hard drive.

If it is a Dell, and you have legal ownership of the unit, contact their tech support. They have the ability to give you a code to unlock the drive.

Putting the drive in another unit will not work either. The drive is actually locked at the daughterboard level of the drive.

Good luck!

I have a NEC VERSA SX with a S.M.A.R.T. status bad notafication. I purchaed a used hard drive but I can not get it to format. It is recognized by the BIOS and by windows 98 & XP hardware profile and KD but I can not get it to be recognized on the desk top or be formated. It just comes up as an undivided partition with the cearial number of the disc and # of bites.
any suggestions

The hard drive is password protected.

You need the password. Bring it back where you got it from.

On some machines you cannot even install another dirve. Both laptop and drive are useless unless you have the password.

hi how r u.i no how to open bius password.

I am having a similar issue with my IBM TP R40. I bought it used and it turns out that the HDD had a password set. I was working on DOS and i suddenly received a blue screen (IBM common issue). I forced a restart on the machine and then it started to get LOCKED HDD on startup. It is different than BIOS password.
Any help or suggestions??

This 'feature' also exists on IBM and Toshiba laptops. Supposedly, if the laptop is stolen the HDD will not work on any other laptop and no other HDD will work on the original laptop either.

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