Unlocking process is done automatically and takes just a few minutes. Also, HDD Unlock Wizard will only allow you to erase/re-use the drive, not access existing data.īy contrast, the blurb for Repair Station says: "Repair Station has the ability to access the Firmware Area and reset the password, thus making your hard drive unlocked. As far as I can see, this would only work if you could boot the laptop from a CD-ROM or whatever, or if you moved the hard drive to a different computer and accessed it as a secondary drive. The drawbacks with HDD Unlock Wizard are that it only works with 32-bit Windows, and you must have a working operating system with an admin account.
These cost money, but you can download trial versions to find out if they will work.
There are a few programs you could try, such as HDD Unlock Wizard and Repair Station. The cost would be far more than the laptop is worth. Or you could take the hard drive apart in a clean room and try to read the data directly, which is a job for a specialised data recovery company. You could, for example, try to read the data stream as the HDD firmware communicates with the Host Protected Area then try to extract the user's password. For more details, see the Password Crackers, Inc site at Įven trickier problems arise if the hard drive contains data that has not been backed up, because there's no obvious way to access it. If this is the case, try entering the backdoor password, which is phoenix. Packard-Bell laptops typically use a Phoenix BIOS that has options for setting four passwords: Supervisor Password, User Password, HDD Password and HDD Master ID. Unfortunately I'm not sure if this will work because the password may have been set in the BIOS chip. However, I'd just try replacing the hard drive in the laptop with a compatible model. I think some PC manufacturers can also erase and reset a drive if you return it. You can probably do this by entering the serial number on the support site at. You could contact Packard-Bell (which is now owned by Acer) to see if you can get a master password.
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