saltfish

Just about one year ago, when I purchased my laptop I placed a BIOS password to prevent other users from chaning important information.

Yeah, that was a great idea, I know.

So, here we are 11 months later, and I run across a utility that will trash the CMOS so that the password is removed. It worked like a charm.

But...

What I didn't know, going into this, is that the cmos password was mirrored onto the harddrive as a 'drivelock' password. Having the CMOS trashed and rebuilt invalidates the password that is stored thereon. So, I flash the BIOS via a boot-cd of my own creation and boom, there is no longer a partition error; now I'm being asked for a drivelock password. This was, once again, apparently set when I set the BIOS password some 11 months ago.

I have contaced Compaq, and they are amazed that I have figured this all out on my own. They also told me that I could NEVER get my BIOS to flash via a CD, (heh!). That's another story. So, they don't know where to get a drivelock master password. So I contacted the MFG of the drive, Hitachi, and they will under no circumstances give out the password.
BUT!!!
They happen to know a company that will remove the PW, and verify all my data for $300. Yeah, bump that noise.

So, the question that I pose to you.

Does anyone know of any methods to remove or disable a 'drivelock' password for a Hitachi drive? Does anyone have any ideas on how to get ANY data from the drive, short of a raw HEX dump?

Any answers will be greatly accepted.

-SF