Over time of repairing computers I have collected some spare parts. In my collection I have some old laptop toshiba sata hdds and they are locked with a password. They were originally on a Toshiba Satellite. I'm wanting to 0 out this particular hard drive so I can put it in a laptop and use it. I've looked for any jumpers I could play with to get the firmware to forget the password but no luck. Is there a program that could help me solve my problem ?
Eraser and call it a day since that will simply nuke everything on the drive itself leaving it raw(unpartitioned, unallocated). If you are booting live from a Windows dvd opening up the command prompt and running the Disk Part tool long enough to nuke the drive at the command prompt option would be another option.
For more then one drive you can also boot live from a drive tool cd like GParted Live or Partition Wizard to simply see any and all partitions deleted with a new primary seen to replace the recovery and any other tools partitions as well as the main C volume. That eliminates the need for an OS to be present in order to run Eraser or any security program.
That's a Windows app! If you have the drive set up in an external enclosure you would then use the program option. For booting live from a Windows disk the command option would see the Disk Part "Clean" command once you List Disk and select the correct drive. It could be Disk 0 or Disk 1 or 2 depending on how many drives you have.
The live boot from a GParted or Partition Wizard cd to use the drive tools gui option would allow you to select that drive from the dropdown list of all drives and then go to work removing whatever partitions are on it. Once done there won't be any password to worry about since the drive would be cleaned off where you can create a brand new primary or wait to see that done with the Windows or other OS installer.
Here I simply keep a live GParted usb flash drive on me never knowing when I will need to change a volume label or mark it as something else. The Clean command from the command prompt option however allows you to keep the Windows repair or installation disk in the drive when going to install the OS. If you opt for a Linux distro instead the live installer will see it's own form of GParted included with the distro to take care of what is seen now.
Eraser is still a good tool to keep onhand even if you use one of the other methods. If you already had a program like Acronis the live cd option features a secure drive erase tool as well in that software. It mostly depends on which OS or version of Windows you are planning to OS the drive or have it as a spare even in an external enclosure for a backup device.
If you are booting live from a Windows disk you would simply go the Recovery Console option for an XP disk or into the repair tools on either a Vista or 7 dvd to run the Clean command if connected to another machine or if the only drive present on a laptop you could go as far as the Clean All command without risk of losing data on another drive. The Clean All command used in Disk Part is the ultimate "wipe all" command used with caution! For a single drive when more then one are present the Clean command is the recommended once the correct drive is selected.
Well I put the locked HDD in the laptop and when I turn it on and press F12 to select what to boot from it brings up the harddisk Security for the HDD and wants me to enter password. In the BIOS I had my usb thumbdrive as first to boot from but can't get past this security block. Since I can't choose to boot from anything how will I be able to use any of the programs to erase it ?
Hello Grego86,
Go to Sevenforums tutorials and follow this great how to by Brink. This should put you on the right track.Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command
The drive would need to be removed and placed in an external enclosure unless the bios is where the password is! Then you would need to unlock the bios setup. But simply placing the drive in an enclosure would see that wiped in a minute's time!
Your mention of not being to select which drive to boot from suggests that's where the lock is. Clearing the cmos to see factory defaults may or may not take care of that for you. For simply bringing up the boot device menu by pressing F12 to select the flash drive would otherwise immediately see everything start loading from the flash drive itself.
This Toshiba drive I pulled from a Toshiba Satellite and put in a eMachines netbook. So the password couldn't be stored in the cmos unless the hard drive uploads it to the new cmos when I swapped it ? I'm thinking it has to be stored on the HDD some how. I have found something new though, when it boots and asks for the PW I can press ESC and get past it to boot to my thumb drive and go from there but even after running the CLEAR cmd I still am unable to install my OS. The CLEAR ALL cmd will not work either, gives me a I/O error pretty much saying it cannot communicate with the HDD. I really do appreciate yals patience, gonna give that tutorial a shot real quick. I'll keep yal posted.
Well come to find out I've seen this same tutorial the other day and have tried the clean and clean all cmds with no luck. The clean cmd does work and I try the create primary partition and assign but with no luck. Maybe its just not meant to get this hdd working lol.
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