Hard drive picked up in BIOS and partly in Windows but cannot access / format

[googlemad]

Bought my laptop hard drive to work yesterday, I've sold it and wanted to wipe it.

 

So plugged it in a spare machine, it is picked up fine in the BIOS but no DOS programs seem to pick it up, Windows does see it in disk management as a uninitialized disk but comes up with a I/O error if I try to initialize it.

 

However I took it home last night and plugged it into my laptop again and it all worked fine! The only thing I can think of therefore is the password I set in the BIOS on my laptop that has to be typed in before the system will boot has put some kind of lock on the hard drive and I can't seem to find a way to remove it?

 

Any ideas as I now won't be at home until after the weekend!

[chazzy2501]

you can set a password for your harddisk on most laptops but some non laptop BIOSes may not be setup to handle that. Put the HD back into your laptop and look for a harddrive lock or password and cancel it.

 

EDIT: if you just want to clear all data before sale you could run DBAN on the laptop before selling it.

Edited March 21, 2012 by chazzy2501

[tigerstar]

the password I set in the BIOS on my laptop that has to be typed in before the system will boot has put some kind of lock on the hard drive

 

That sounds like it. Depending on the laptop and what BIOS it uses, the "boot password" may in fact be an ATA hard drive password, which must be entered before the drive will allow access. Fortunately, because this is a universal standard you don't need the original computer in order to remove that password - you can just use a tool like MHDD or ATApwd to remove it.

[googlemad]

Well I tried everything, all the software suggested above and even a Toshiba laptop from work which did prompt for the password but wouldn't accept the correct password!

 

In the end I just ended up driving like mad back home at lunch to stick it back in my laptop and cleared the password!