Wolf Halton wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> That sounds like good trouble-stooting. Seems like to me the password
> on the bios has not been cleared yet. Have you considered taking it to
> a certified repair center to have the password cleared? That would be
> cheating, but it is probably not a lot more than a new hard-drive that
> might not work. I have never heard of a hard-drive-attached rom
> passwording feature. This is very interesting.

Here's a pretty good explanation, from Barry Watzman, in comp.sys.laptops.

The OP was questioning how to reset a hard drive password...

"This mechanism is entirely in the hard drive itself, and the design
philosophy that the hardware should become useless before the data
should become available without the proper password.

Basically, at power-on, you have to supply the password before the drive
will even respond to any IDE data transfer commands -- including the
commands that let the BIOS recognize that the hard drive exists. Until
the proper password is entered, the command to enter the password is the
only command that the drive will respond to. Therefore, until it's
entered, you can't use FDISK or anything else, because the drive
effectively doesn't yet exist.

It's not physically impossible to reset the password, but the knowledge
of how to do it is generally unknown, and the equipment to do it is
generally not available. There are a few places (very few) that offer
the service, but the cost is higher than the cost of a new hard drive,
so it only makes sense if it's the data, rather than the drive, that's
important. [and, hopefully, the places that can reset it ask lots and
lots of questions first]"

Notan