Hidden area on drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter R Murphy
  • Start date Start date
R

R Murphy

Hi

I have an IBM (2 1/2") drive which appears to be "password locked". A little
research has led me to discover the HPA (Host Protected Area) that ATA
drives can have, and the allegation that hdds can and do have an eeprom on
them.

With the goal of making the drive usable ( local charity shop - no refunds
etc ) any suggestions as to what to do about this? Will zapping the HPA,
which does appear to be achievable, render the drive useless, or am I on the
wrong track altogether.

Thanks for any advice

Rob
 
R Murphy said:
Hi

I have an IBM (2 1/2") drive which appears to be "password locked". A
little
research has led me to discover the HPA (Host Protected Area) that ATA
drives can have, and the allegation that hdds can and do have an eeprom on
them.

With the goal of making the drive usable ( local charity shop - no refunds
etc ) any suggestions as to what to do about this? Will zapping the HPA,
which does appear to be achievable, render the drive useless, or am I on
the
wrong track altogether.

Thanks for any advice

Rob
Click to expand...
Most HDD manufacturers provide special diagnostic utilities for their drives
available for download. Have you tried obtaining such software from the
IBM/Hitachi website here: http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/hdd/hddredirect.html and
running it? In terms of the HPA (commonly used for hidden restore partitions
for many OEMs - these are often password or BIOS locked so that the software
can only be retored when thedrive is connected to the original OEMs
motherboard), there are utilities to obliterate these hidden partitions and
by doing so you shouldn't render the drive useless - all that will happen is
the hidden partition will be deleted and space made available for other
data.. What tells you the drive is "password locked" - Is your goal to just
get the drive functional again or do you want to retrieve data from it? If
its the former, you could try writing zeros to the drive using manufacturers
software.

Drives do normally contain EEPROMs which are used to hold data about bad
sectors as well as flashable drive firmware and S.M.A.R.T. history etc This
is normally inaccessible (in any meaningful way which enables manipulation
of its contents) for end users though.

Paul
 
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