Legit Reviews

My son in all his wisdom put a password on his hard drive. Gateway 7330GZ notebook. You guessed it, either he typed it wrong twice or just forgot it. Boot up screen says "Hard disc locked enter password"- As it is now, it makes a good paper weight. Any sugestions, Gateway support says to send it to them $$$$$ Trying to maybe do it ourselves. Please help!!!!!!!
Thanx

Is it just a boot password or is it hard coded to the drive itself?

What model Gateway is it?

I've read about 2 ways to do this (but never tried either):

1 - In safe mode - Start, Run, control userpasswords2 - may only work for "user" password.

2 - Using windows CD and the "repair" process. Setup will check disks, copy files, restart. After restart, keep your eye on the lower left hand side of the screen and when you see the "Installing Devices" progress bar, press SHIFT + F10. This is a security hole! A command console will now open up giving you the potential for wide access to your system. At the prompt, type NUSRMGR.CPL and press Enter. Voila! You have just gained graphical access to your User Accounts in the Control Panel. Type
control userpasswords2 and you're set. Close the command box, and finish the repair.

And finally the solution that I know works - Format

I've run into a few locked hard drives on laptops, if it's a software based lock (on the HD) reformat will work. If it's drive lock like on my HP lappy then the password is stored on chip and not even removing the battery resetting the Bios, clearing cmos none of that will work.

Not even putting a new hard drive in, or removing the existing HD and reformatting it and putting it back in. With drive lock the password is not only stored on chip it's also stored on the HD (encrypted) and the cmos/bios password has to match the HD password. So when CMOS/BIOS see's the newly reformatted drive it come up and tells you contact customer support or an authorized dealer.

After 2 days of dealing with the machine (not mine thankfully) I had to send her to HP to have the drive lock removed. It's probably setting on a shelf in her closet still locked.

Pretty frustrating cause I can defeat almost every password scheme from XP back to dos 1, but drive lock it's a hard nut.

ibleet wrote:I've read about 2 ways to do this (but never tried either):

1 - In safe mode - Start, Run, control userpasswords2 - may only work for "user" password.

For this Method even when you have full administrator privileges all you can do is change the Administrator password which is very handy within itself....