[yesult]

OK, so I bought 3 SATA WD2500 Western Digital drives off e-bay that came from a 12 disk array that was no longer needed (hooked up to a 3ware 9500s-12). I receive the drives and they seemed to power up fine but any machine I put them in recognised them but didn't want to recognize that they were HDs. I ran Western Digitals Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and it immediately came back saying (on all 3 drives) "Drive Is Locked - Error/status code: 0220". Here is what wdc.com says about it:

Quote

Security feature of the drive reports locked status. Some vendors use the security feature to ensure the usage of only specific drives in their system, or the drive may have been locked by a user using a third party utility to enable this feature. The same utility and the original code used to lock the drive are necessary to unlock this drive. Please contact the system vendor for the above-mentioned information.

The guy that sold them didn't delete the array before he took them out of the machine.

So, I've contacted WD and they haven't responded yet. The guy I bought them from is willing to take them back but I was wondering if anyone knew of a utility to unlock these drives without either RMAing them to WD or sending them back to the guy to see if his 3ware card will unlock them.

[continuum]

I've never seen this, although I've never tried to "lock" a drive either. None of the drives I've attached to a 3ware have ever showed up as "locked" on another system, but I've never tried to lock one on purpose either...????

[Saber]

Have you tried Formating them in DOS? I have not yet run across a problem with a locked Hard drive. But Formating stuff form DOS gets through allot of stuff, that is, unless you want to save the information on them.

Nick
ManageComm, Inc.

[Mkruer]

Big @$$ magnet anyone?

[yesult]

Saber, on Oct 15 2004, 12:15 PM, said:

Have you tried Formating them in DOS?

Yeah, I tried with a win98 bootdisk but when I started fdisk it said there were no HDs hooked up to the system. Unless you meant like DOS 6.22 or something? I guess on that same line would linux be able to do something with it?

continuum...
Have you ever tried taking the drives out of a machine when you haven't deleted the array first? If you have and the drives have still worked fine on a regular machine then maybe his 3ware card wouldn't be able to undo the lock.

[blakerwry]

The drive can be locked through firmware, hdparm in linux may be able to unlock it, or perhaps a firmware upgrade or CMOS reset (so to speak) will unlock the drive without requiring the same utility and unlock code.

[Saber]

Yes, I have taken drives out and used them not only by themselves. But in other Raid Setups to. However, I have not used 3ware in all honesty, So I can't really speak for it. It may solve your issue.

As for Using the win 98 bootdisk, and if that format did not work. Then it looks like your not going to be able to get past the lock by simply formating the drives. Perhaps you could try a program like "Easy Recovery Professional" Or perhaps something from Symantec.

Nick
ManageComm, Inc.

[freeborn]

I have not used the 9000 series of 3Ware cards yet but the 8000 series did not have any obvious provisions to security lock drives.

With Security Lock enabled there is very little you can do with a hard drive. It will respond to the identify command but no read or write operations are permitted (they will all abort) until a proper password is supplied with the unlock command. The password is a 32 bit value and you are allowed 5 attempts per power cycle. I suppose you could try brute force to unlock the drives but at 5 attempts per power cycle I suspect it will take a very long time.

Unless you can get one of the passwords I think you are out of luck. ATA Security has 3 password levels: Master, UserHi, UserMax. If a User password is set and you know the Master password you can execute a security erase with the Master Password and once that is completed the drive will be unlocked. Unfortunately, you must know the Master password to do this.

Free

[Occupant 2]

Ive seen this before. with a 3ware card, you have to delete the drive from the array before you can use the drive in another system.

what Ive had to do is take a hard drive to a 3ware card, go into the 3ware card's bios delete the unit, and then the drive would work normally.

[blakerwry]

perhaps 3ware tech support can help you then, I'm sure they'd be aware of it and have a fix readily available.