I've got a locked hard drive because my mom forgot her password. Its from a really old laptop with a 20 Gb laptop HDD. I've looked everywhere for free software to unlock the MODEL: MHN2200AT Fujitsu (20Gb) Does anyone know of an easier / free way to get the password back?

There's no standard way in which a hard drive can be "locked". A few drives are hardware-encrypted. Yours probably isn't (you'd know if it was). It's possible to encrypt the contents of a drive; if you don't know the encryption password, and a decent algorithm was used, you're hosed. It's possible that the drive simply has an OS installed for which you have forgotten the login information. That's an easy system to recover from, because the drive isn't "locked"; just stick it in a different computer, and copy the files off. (You'll probably have to do it as an administrator.)

When I boot with the drive in the original laptop is says "The drive is password authenticated, enter a password"

I'm 100% sure the contents are not encrypted. Apparently, there's a chip in the drive that does the password authentication and thereby making access to the drive hard without the proper password.

I even booted with GPARTED (a partition boot disk) and I wasn't even allowed to format the drive.


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