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.
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.
