I have a few of these Western Digital WD80EB hard drives and understand there is a tool to unlock such drives. The tool is ATAPWD.EXE and may be found using your favorite search engine. I also understand that the master password is WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD. However, the master password gave me error messages. I found this technique (using the ATAPWD.EXE and the known master password) in a forum and it worked for me. Successfully tested June 18, 2008.
- Connect the hard drive as primary master (remove the jumper)
- Create a bootable floppy with ATAPWD.EXE on it.
- Boot from the floppy and launch ATAPWD.EXE select the WD80EB drive and press ENTER.
- Select ERASE PREPARE and then ERASE UNIT.
- Enter the master password: WDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWDCWD
- It will give you a Busy error, that means it is erasing the drive so please don’t turn off the computer.
- After 30min press F5 to refresh the list and you will see that the drive has become unlocked
Note: For the final step, I pressed F5 almost immediately after the Busy error. The result, the drive disappeared from the menu. After about 10 minutes, I pressed F5 again, the drive was back and unlocked. The time frame outlined above may be the worst case scenario.
Source(s)
- www.xbox-scene.com
- www.llamma.com
