HELP! Hard drive locked

well if theres nothing important on the hardrive i would just go and buy another one

how long have you not used it for??

troppo

formatting as a last result. if your willing to format download boot and nuke http://dban.sourceforge.net/
(note: took me an hour for 15gig)

Hi Duke,

Why not download a *nix Live CD and boot it?

Slax is small and lite and has read/write support for NTFS.
If the drive is readable you could recover you data.

your better off to just pop in your XP disc and format via that its safer and takes way way way less time to formatt a full hard drive than 1 hour for 15 gig

thats terrable i formatted my drive just about 2 weeks ago and my OS partition is 50Gb and it took me about 45 mins to do a full format

troppo

Did u check the bois? There may b a setting there that was changed.
Try 2 reset the bios with jumper if the change to default settings doesn't work, cause many times reseting it by software doesn't change password settings.

I would rather not go the expense of buying a new drive. I am happy to format the existing one. I have tried the restore function but the boot does not even go as far as running it, the hard drive lock literally comes up immediately. Sometimes it says it cannot detect the OS. I have removed the battery to free the drive once, but it seems to have returned!

Thanks for the suggestions though, I will try XP and see if that will load prior to the drive lock activating.

I have removed the battery to free the drive once, but it seems to have returned!

Does this mean that It helped to take out the battery (while disconnected from power, no battery and waited for 1 min.) or that u tried it and it didn't help?

I found the service manual on the HP US website. There are specific instructions for getting past lock outs in there. I actually had to remove the BIOS battery and the power battery for 5 minutes, then reboot with mains only. It appeared to have worked when I got back into the BIOS, but it hung (as i think there is OS corruption) when i rebooted the password request was back.

Were u allso locked out of the bios from the beginning? (it did not sound like it)

After u reset the bios did it boot at all without the being docked?
I looked around the net and it seems u have 3 chioces
1 - figure out the password
2 - spend the money and get it cracked open
3 - try what silverbeard or AnthonyJ recomended.

I have no experiance with this. but I would try and connect it via a usb connector (u can buy a case or a cable that connects from the HD to a usb) and maybe u will get access to the data.

good luck

I am going to give the DBAN a go, but it appears to be an executable file and I am unable to reach a prompt of any kind. I am hoping that it will work on boot up. I have tried running XP setup, but it cannot access the partition (for obvious reasons). Thanks a lot fo your help, I appreciate it.