The Vault - Help & Advice

This is a collection of articles written by us from
2014 onwards that offer help and advice to readers
about issues we encountered with equipment that
came to us for recovery.

This section is not maintained.
Information in the articles was correct at the time
they were written but may now be out of date.

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ATA password protected Fujitsu MHU2100AT Hard Drive

Hard Disk Drive: Fujitsu MHU2100AT

Type: Laptop

Capacity: 100Gb

Problem: ATA password protected, no commercially available means of bypassing the password

A hard drive that has an ATA password enabled will not allow it”s data to be read, even on a sector by sector basis until the password has either been entered correctly or reset / disabled.

At the time this recovery was performed there were no commercial tools available for tackling this problem, therefore we wrote our own using our Diskmaster hard disk recovery and repair tool.

The ease or difficulty of manipulating ATA passwords on hard drives is manufacturer specific: for example, the approach necessary for Fujitsu hard drives is completely different from that of Seagate drives (you may like to read our Seagate ATA password removal case study). ATA password removal on this Fujitsu drive was a three step process of

Putting the drive into the manufacturers factory mode
Resetting the ATA password
Power cycling

This removed the ATA password and the hard disk drives data area was now fully accessible.

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The Vault - Help & Advice

ATA password protected Fujitsu MHU2100AT Hard Drive