locked laptop hard drive

[marktoulson]

we had a latop that was stolen by a pupil in the school and they took it to the local computer shop to get it formatted and they realised at the shop that it was stolen contacted the school and we got it back but they decieded that they would lock the hard drive i dont know why they did and when they told us the password the person that wrote it down got it wrong

and now we cannot get on the laptop anyone got any ideas on how to remove the harddrive lock

[FN-GM]

Was it a password set in the BIOS?

You could try this - Active@ Kill Disk Hard Drive Eraser. Low Level Format.

[marktoulson]

i dont think it was locked in the bios cause when you try and boot the laptop it just coms up with locked hard drive

[CPLTD]

we had a latop that was stolen by a pupil in the school and they took it to the local computer shop to get it formatted and they realised at the shop that it was stolen contacted the school and we got it back but they decieded that they would lock the hard drive i dont know why they did and when they told us the password the person that wrote it down got it wrong

and now we cannot get on the laptop anyone got any ideas on how to remove the harddrive lock

have you tried going back to the computer shop as surely they have a record or something ?

[FN-GM]

Try Killdisk and see what happens.

What did they do about the student?

@simon, they provided the password but wrote it down wrong when it was set

[marktoulson]

the computer shop went bust 2 weeks after we got it back

and the students were in y11 and now have gone

[marktoulson]

just had a look at killdisk but it wont work cause the machine willnot leet you boot from any devices

[powdarrmonkey]

This is a lock in the BIOS itself, you need to do a hard reset with a jumper on the motherboard probably. What model laptop?

[flashsnaps]

Locked Harddrive, is that specific to that harddrive? What happens if you swope the harddrive out?

[keithu]

There's a program here which claims to unlock hard drives:

HDD Unlock - Overview

Unfortunately they want you to pay for each unlock and you will still lose the data from the drive. As far as I know, you can't recover the data without the password once the drive's been locked in firmware.

[pagelad]

Ive just installed a Dell with one of those locked laptop drives.

When i read the documentation it said to boot from the original install disk and that would do a secure erase if the password was lost

[steveg]

Take the hard disk out and put it in another machine, if you have the same problem on that one then the password is on the disk itself and there is nothing you can do, just get a new hard drive. If the problem remains with the laptop then its a bios boot password, so you should be able to crack / remove it.


Steve

[marktoulson]

thank you for all your help

the problem was fixed this morning before i got to work

and no one told me that it was goinmg to be looked at

thank you to all those that have posted ideas on how to help

[mac_shinobi]

If its a Dell computer give them the asset tag of the computer and they will generate a password that is a backdoor for a better word and will allow you to get in and unlock it and format and re install etc.

[AngryTechnician]

and the students were in y11 and now have gone

Doesn't mean the police can't arrest them for handling stolen goods (even if they can't prove it was them who stole it).