For all you folks who have written me about removing or cracking Harddrive Passwords on the Admin Password thread, and I have told to forget about it, that there was no economical way to recover a harddrive that had a password, the sun broke through the gloom today!! I have a Toshiba 40gb 5400rpm that I cracked by using this online service at $49.50 a single drive.
http://hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/
You download their software, set up an account with a screen name and password, then pay by credit card or other means. They send you a confirmation letter by Email(but not to a free mail account) with a very long Service Code and instructions. It takes awhile to get setup, but the actual crack took only seconds, and after reboot, the drive showed up normally in BIOS and Windows with full access.
For multiple drives, the price per drive drops.
There is a negative side; not all drives are supported; the most obvious lack is in the Hitachi brand and no older IBMs at all. When you access their site however, they will tell you up front which ones are supported.
The problem drive must be connected as a Secondary IDE Channel Master on a machine running either W2000 or W-XP, and nothing else slaved to it. I used the 2nd Harddrive Module on a Inspiron 8200. but unplugging your CD Drives and connecting just the notebook harddrive using a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE Adapter would probably work as well.
If you use a Dell Notebook as I did, expect to get a Password screen asking for that drive's password. Ignore it and just start rapidly pressing the enter key; that will get you past the Password screen and allow the computer to boot from the C: Drive as normal. The protected HDD will not show in My Computer, and BIOS will show it as a 0mb HDD if you look there. After the crack and reboot, the drive showed in My Computer and at full capacity in BIOS.
It would be hard to justify the cost for an older, smaller HDD unless it has critical data you need, but any drive of 40gb or more would certainly be worth the cost.

Having decided that a 6 gig hard drive is not worth trying to remove pass word. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting a replacement at a reasonable cost?

Ps thanks to everyone who has participated in related dell admin password thread

www.newegg.com and www.zipzoomfly.com if you are in the USA. The cost for clearing could only be justified if you had crucial files or data on drives smaller than 40gb. I queried the support chief at that website about the lack of most Hitachi and all IBMs; He informed me that those drives do not respond to software cracking methods by online connection , and that they are working on on-site methods for those.The main brands of notebook drives supported are Fujitsu and Toshiba.

If you can verify all ownership info for the Dell system, the dell tech support will give you a master password to clear it.

Very true, Kenny81, but there are tons of resold units which came from the corporate structure, with no record of the original owners. If you set a HDD password on one of those and then forget it , or if one of your kids does, you are out of luck. The one I cleared came from a tech acquaintance of mine who had given up on it, and replaced the drive with a new one for his customer. Because of its size and speed, I felt it was worth the expenditure

I have a dell latitude cpt with a password locked hard drive due to similar circumstances as formally mentioned.
Can I just fit any 2.5 inch hard drive in my caddy?
Or can I expect more problems.

Contact me at email removedfor a piece of software to run before you install a new drive. Any drive of recent manufacture will work. There are some drives that were made before 2000 that are too high (17-19mm), but your model will take any 12.5 or 9.5mm. Do not forget to change the IDE Plug Adapter from the old drive to the new one. All Internal Harddrives for notebooks are 2.5" wide and have the same 44 pin interface, but most laptop MFRs use a specific IDE Plug to connect the drive to the motherboard.

Some tools to remowe ATA password
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ANTIVIRUS-SUPP...QQcmdZViewItem
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

I get back if they work or not.

Not so. You may work for Dell but you don't know what you're talking about. For the one problem on the other page, sure it will work most of the time. For the problem here, that won't work at all.