![](https://seccdn.libravatar.org/avatar/77cb4da5f72bc176182dcc33f03a18f3.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Friday, 2009-03-06 at 12:29 +0200, Dave Plater wrote:
Hi, I have a seagate drive which has somehow become locked in maximum security mode, does anyone have any idea how to reset the master password. There's a program on the ultimate boot cd to do this but it requires the master password. I've looked in seagate site and forums and all I have come up with is the drive is a brick when this happens. Googling only brings up a master password for xbox which doesn't work.
I had to investigate this for a friend recently, and as far as I could discover, it is impossible. If the disk is protected by password and you don't know it, the disk is lost. Worse, there is no way to reset password and erase/format the data, unless you know the master password. The idea is to securely protect the data for the owner of the disk. There are some differences between manufacturers. The tool to manipulate the password in linux is hdparm. There is a tool around (HDDerase), used to securely erase a disk, that as part of the procedure, the first thing it does is secure the disk with password. I think it does what the hdparm manual calls "--security-erase PWD" or "--security-erase-enhanced PWD". If the procedure is aborted, the disk is not accessible by anybody without the password. I can't think of a real use for this feature, unless the "bad guys" are coming and you hit the self-destruct button of your computers. The thing is, my friend had used that utility, and aborted it in the middle (or the battery gave out, I think); he was not aware of the password thing. Some days later, a second pass of the utility finished the erasure and cleared the password, so we recovered the disk - totally blank. The utility came in one of do-it-all utilities CDs for windows. He wanted to clear the disk and reformat, so he used it (click, click, enter) - without reading: obviously, he does not read English, but he wouldn't have read it were it in Spanish, anyway :-p There are also businesses that claim to be able to recover such disks. These are the links I found, a few months back (I looked at Fujitsu because our disk was from that make; I got no answer to my email to Fujitsu): <http://search.fujitsu.com/es/search.jsp?q=contraseña&btnG.x=0&btnG.y=0&btnG=Buscar&entqr=0&restrict=all_es&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&num=10&ie=UTF-8> <http://www.fujitsu.com/es/services/products/peripherals/handydrives/dataIII.html> <http://www.fujitsu.com/es/news/pr/20071024.html> <http://www.google.es/search?num=100&hl=es&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=ROD&q=mhz2320bh+password&btnG=Buscar&meta=> We specialize in Fujitsu Data Recovery services <http://www.californiaraidrecovery.com/fujitsu-data-recovery-service.html> Encryption HDD FAQ <http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/encryption-faq.htm> <http://www.hddunlock.com/support/faq/> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDDerase> <http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf> <http://www.google.es/search?q=hdderase&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a> <http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/> <http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml> <http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=148> Wish you luck! - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkmxbQoACgkQtTMYHG2NR9VDCgCeJv6NGo5YSOrBQphbUU0yDwLG e28An3lr00PO+VGT0NZa6GbrUWd8FUcA =PKIU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----