data on a locked hard drive

[cilmike2]

Well here's the story...my cousin's boss has this computer and he has a bunch of business contacts on it, he took it to geek squad and they want to charge him $500 for it, but he doesnt want to do that. He told me he would give me half that if could do it, so i said i would try. But obviously if i had the password i would put it in...however he doesnt have it because it came from a different company...if you have any ideas...let me know. Thanks

[rcgreen]

Unfortunately, it's just as I thought.

c't 8/2005, S. 172: Hard Disk Security

It took some Googling, but I found it. The security feature is in
the firmware of the drive, on its controller board. You have a brick.
You can't access the drive from Knoppix because it needs
the BIOS to send the password as soon as the drive powers up.
Apparently, all drives have this feature nowadays, but only laptops
actually use it.

If the data are really valuable, send the drive to a specialist $$$
One other possibility is, if you have an identical drive, substitute
the controller from the good one. Security sucks...

[cilmike2]

alrighty, well thanks a lot!