Ed Durrant wrote:

>Harddisks in laptops are most often set with a password to protect the 
>data on them should the system be stolen. If you only have a cmos 
>password in the bios and someone steals the system to gain business data 
>and if they can simply take the disk out and put it into another system 
>to read it - things aren't very secure - the Bios password (which in many 
>cases used to be able to be reset by a strap on the motherboard anyway 
>(no longer so in recent laptops)) doesn't protect data on the harddisk.
>
>Data on the harddisk can be further secured by encrypting it.
>  
>

SCSI Bioses (Ctrl + A or similar to access), often include the low level 
format feature.

>Cheers/2
>
>Ed.
>
>rallee2{at}comcast.net wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Hello
>> Doesn't low level formatting assume a scsi drive?  Most IDE drives
are no longer user formattable AFAIK.  Also, why would anyone password
protect a hard drive?  Here I am assuming they mean in firmware which also
should be unaffected by a low level format.  I can't help but wonder if the
person assuming the hard drive is password protected actually means his
bios is password protected since I can imagine little value in password
protercting the firmware.  Also, it seems common for people to refer to
their encased system as "the cpu" or "the hard drive"
as a generic term since they don't really understand the concept of a
motherboard or the entire system as a whole.
>>Jimmy
>>
>>
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>>>inkleput{at}isp.com wrote:
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>I didn't know until today there was such a thing as a hard drive
>>>>password.  But there is a caddy on eBay that has an HD the seller
>>>>believes to be locked up on a password.  He's just throwing in the HD
>>>>under those conditions.
>>>>
>>>>I found an article on the net which says you can apply a
voltage to some
>>>>BIOS pins to remove the password.  Is anybody familiar with this
>>>>procedure?
>>>>
>>>>Jim L, via eCS 1.14 version of OS/2
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Just low level format the drive.
>>>
>>>The HD password is data like any other on the drive.
>>>
>>>A normal format wont clear it but a low level format will.
>>>
>>>Cheers/2
>>>
>>>Ed.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Yahoo! Groups Links
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>
>>
>> 
>>
>>    
>>
>
>
>
> 
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
> 
>
>
>
>  
>



 
Yahoo! Groups Links

 To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/os2hardware/

 To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    os2hardware-unsubscribe{at}yahoogroups.com

 Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 



---