Hello all.

A Dell 510m purchased from ebay has come into my hands... and I am having some very troubled times with it.

I have read through the forums and the shorting method has worked perfectly to bypass the Bios password. However... it is now the HDD password I am stuck with.

I do not care about the original hard drive.

I purchased a brand new Seagate ST96812A 60GB hard drive..... and the system stopped asking for a password. However... the system lets you partition the drive but thats it!

If I use a tool such as MHDD or HDDErase.... they both tell me that the drive is not locked, but is in a "Frozen" status. I also have two 10gb HDD's which both have the same problem when inserted into the laptop... but are fine in others.

When you go into the BIOS with any of these drives installed.. it reports back that the HDD password is indeed disabled. Setting a password and removing it has no effect on the problem.


Can anyone assist with this problem?

Cheers!

Hi

When you shorted the password out, did you then run the DST software on my site to reenable the service tag?

If not then the chip that hold the passwords is not in a normal state and if their was also a locked HD then you will get this problem.

Download the DST software from my site

www.ihatedell.info

Either use the floppy or the CD ISO and run it on the machine, you would also be best flashing the BIOS to the latest version, if it already has the latest version then just flash over it with the same version.

Regards

Still having the same issues

I followed all the advice I could find

I flashed the BIOS to the oldest version I could find.... then flashed it back to the latest (A05 to A11).

I then ran the service tag removal software... removed the service tag and rebooted.

I then ran the DST tool again and reapplied the service tag... but the problem still remains.


Strangely however......................

If I boot up the system into MHDD with an unlocked hard drive.... MHDD will say that the drive is frozen ect and every time you use the HDD it comes back HDD read failure.

However... if you boot into MHDD then hot swap the hard drives to the locked one I have..... and try and unlock it until the counter expires (5 password attempts)..... and then swap back to the unlocked hard drive.. everything works!

The system then lets you install Windows XP ect with no issues. However then when I reboot with the unlocked HDD..... the same problem happens! Drive is frozen and unreadable.


Anyone got any ideas at all on this one?

Wow good info.. could have save the company $3,000 bucks when users forget their HDD password, but we now use a lotus notes dbase to recover those who still forget..