UNLOCK laptop HD

So what happened when you went 'initialise' in disk management?

 

when i try this it says the device is not ready

 

and both drives tell you this, regardless of which method you use to plug them in, and which PC you plug them into?

 

At what point does the HD ask you for a password?

 

is he trying to run a repair of the OS and not a format and getting the admin PW? maybe it is in need of a FDISK /MBR because as far as i'm aware there are no passwords that would stop you doing a format only access the drive unless its some military grade encryption.

Try this out http://www.dban.org/

Have you tried "format c: /s" from the "A:>" prompt?

 

Yeah i totally agree, something is'nt right. I mean you can lock / encrypt / do anything to a partition you've made. You can make a partition unaccesable but in the long run if someone wants to delete that partition and start fresh there is no hardware available to the public at present that would stop you.

 

After reading through this thread, thought I would throw in my 2 cents. try running the cmd prompt and type in diskpart, list disk (this should list all the hdd's connected.) select disk n (where n is the number of your disk you want to clean with the password on it.)
after that type list partition, then select partition n (same as select disk n)
lastly, type delete partition override.

hope this helps

 

yes more or less

 

this looked as if it could work but it didnt. after i selected the drive, and when i typed list partition it said "there are no partitions on this disk to show"

 

do the same steps again ignoring anything to do with partitions

Type "select disk n" (n is the number of the disk)
type "delete disk override"

this should completely erase the hdd completely.
Hope this works.

 

he's only getting the password prompt when he uses the manufactures software. have you tried leaving the password field blank or googleing the softwares name and the word password next to it? does the windows user account you are using have a password or the admin account have a password? if so try using these when it asks you for a password.

 

i tryed this but it said the drive cannot be deleted

 

not really i made a mistake in my earler message, that password was for my current HD. When i removed my SATA from my laptop and replaced it with the locked 100gb SATA HD(leaving it to boot from that disk). the results were that it directly sent me to a black screen which asked for a password, i could not start window or even start a boot cd.

 

Out of interest, what laptops did these drives come out of?

 

i am not sure because my brother got these drives from his friend and the friend doesn't remember the password.