Toshiba Satellite Pro thinks it has a HDD password?

Toshiba Satellite Pro M-15, "outta the blue" now thinks it has a HDD password??? how'd that happen?

the manual says to hold 'ESC' and hit the power button from a dead startup, and that allows me to press F1 and enter Setup. No worky. The system goes directly to the "Enter the HDD Password" screen.

Anyone encounter this before? surely this is not a hack job.... how do you dive through the OS layers all the way to BIOS and setup a bogus pwd. Plus, in the Toshiba world, the HDD password has to match an Administrator boot password... neither of which have ever been setup on this system.

??

I'm thinking I'm going to have to crack the case and pull the bios batt out.
anyone have a diff idea?

z
:cry

 

You’ll have to take the laptop to the authorized center. A certified technician has to call Toshiba and get the special code to unlock the laptop.
I have tried many ways to unlock a password protected hard drive, and its no go.
You will have to replace the hard drive- the cmos battery will not help the hard drive problem.

 

well, it seems rather like a complete halt to the hard drive.
not sure why the BIOS reports such a message, but when I remove it, the system boots normally, and the bios reports no BIOS passwords whatsoever. in the Toshiba scheme, if you are going to go route of hdd pwd, you must make it match a boot [Administrator-assumed] pwd. neither flag is set.
its a false message.
i have a failed or failing hd.

now to find a forensics outfit. if it won't spin, its beyond my skills and willingness.

 

thx for the overwhelming response, team.
:-D

Turns out the "Enter Password" is a BIOS error. later corrected, but you have to search under "all operating systems" to discover this one and only-ever BIOS rev for that particular model.

the HDD is stone cold dead. or the IDE controller it rode in on. can't determine which using common tools. BIOS is in the way at every step of the debug process [worst BIOS code I've ever seen. basically does not match its menu]

 

zapp
If it is a documented bios fault, that was later corrected, that could be just a bios update needed.
To be sure, have you tried to access the hard drive from another pc/laptop via usb, or, similar methods? If the hard drive has become password locked, then you will not get into it all- if it is not password locked, and the laptop is giving a false , then , you should be able to read your data from the other pc/laptop- even format it, if you want to. I sincerely doubt that you will read it, but I would be interested to know , if you can.
I have tried every trick I could find, and never managed to get into a password protected hard drive, so I would appreciaye you letting majorgeeks know , if you get around it.
I found that any passworde drives I tried to get into spun up o.k but I could not even look past the door.

 

i'll keep posting.
so far, every disk utility that even recognizes that A hard drive is attached, fails to read even rudimentary firmware info off the drive. Win7 Disk Management cannot, seatools cannot, paragon cannot, and the list. I can feel the drive attempting to spin up, several tries, then goes dormant. its pathetic... like watching your pet hamster die in your hand :cry

i did get the bios patched up. they still have an issue however with their bios, and it leaves me with just a shadow of a doubt as to who killed whom. I can't [so far] get any diagnostic tool to prove to me that the ide controller is alive and well. the buses are separate for the plug-in DVD reader and the hard drive. so, for the moment I'm trying to find a spare notebook that I can stick the drive in, so the bios/everything is different. unfortunately the drive is an old ide type and the notebooks I have are all sata.

their bios apparently uses an intel 'boot manager' to seek bootable tracks from wherever it can. even when i completely turn off booting from hdd, the boot process will freeze when it goes looking for the hdd mbr... freeze and delay, apparently because it is expecting a request to handoff or something. i have numerous bootable cd's and dvd's for troubleshooting, auto memtest, disk checkers, linuxes & doses and etc. only one or two of them could get the system booted sans hdd. finally got one of the linuxes up and tested various parts of the system which all went ok.

 

to repeat something from earlier: the toshiba password scheme was layered so that if one establishes a boot-time password for the Admin, it would accept that, save it and go. however if one tries to establish for the hdd a pwd diff from that of the main system access, such will be denied. so they have to match. both features were disabled in bios when I first looked at it. unlikely that a random goof could set both pwd's identical and not leave a trace.

 

Well, I'm in the final chapter of this saga now and have one more need if anyone happens to stumble into this thread. is there such a thing as a Windows XP STARTUP disc, as opposed to SETUP disc? So far I have not found such a thing unless its called "Linux n". The geek sites I went to which claimed such an image were stretching the facts a tad. they had Win2K startup images, or dos, or plenty of ME or Win98 et al, but no WinXP. One frank soul said "only from Microsoft via download" and when reading the support bulletins on MS support site, they only provide SETUP, not STARTUP.

So back to the drive: its the motherboard. not sure the extent of the problem since the other thing that does not seem to exist is real hardware-level hard burn-in tests that find such issues [I had one in the past but lost in the disc maze now]. All such that I have at hand are BIOS dependent, and in this case the stupid Toshiba BIOS apparently mistakes "no IDE controller" for "no hard drive", but then in the older BIOS it would "mark" the drive firmware as having a HDD Password which in fact was not the case. The newer BIOS simply says "no device", and that's the end of that. no device, no boot, no load, no spinup.

Paragon Backup.... ah how I love theee. THis is the third Time Paragon has come through when nothing else would. I hooked up the "dead" drive via USB, got Win7 Disk Management to assign a letter [although initially it could not read any sectors at all.... device not ready]. Paragon sees the drive, and flags an I/O Error. But gives option "Proceed anyways"... which we did. successfully created a complete image of the drive, which I stashed on a good system. Then I parsed that image and restored to a temp folder all the data files that mattered.

Finally, I nuked the drive using Disk Management - quick ntfs. Hooked it backup, used Paragon to Restore. This does not fix the real problem in the motherboard but at least lets me crank the system with a CD, then flip to the C drive which is now a usb external, and manually kickstart Winxp.
sheesh. if there is a way to write a batch file that could do all this, someone who is code-savvy help me out!

 

Ummm.... this is how I get into password protected hard drives.

1.) Get a Linux CD.
2.) Boot from that.
3.) Now the fun starts. Change drives to the hard drive - as you haven't booted up from the hard drive, it should let you onto it from the Linux drive.
4.) Do EXACTLY this - I'll explain the trick at the end:-

cd\
cd\windows\system32
mkdir temphack
copy logon.scr temphack\logon.scr
copy cmd.exe temphack\cmd.exe
del logon.scr
rename cmd.exe logon.scr
exit

So what you just told windows to backup is the command program and the screen saver
file. Then you edited the settings so when windows loads the screen saver, you will get an unprotected dos prompt without logging in. When this appears enter this command that’s in parenthesis (net user password). So if the admin user name is Doug and you want the password 1234 then you would enter “net user Doug 1234″ and now you’ve changed the admin password to 1234. Log in, do what you want to do, copy the contents of temphack back into system32 to cover your tracks.

Howzat, guys and gals!!

Yours respectfully

ulrichburke

 

i broke the hard drive. then wiped it. then restored and image I had made with paragon b/u/r [the best... without a doubt]

now I find my problem was elsewhere: the ide controller is bad, and something is sporadically giving me a ROM Checksum error [which ROM?]. at any rate, I have the hard drive partitioned now for dual boot Ubunty 10.4 after Win XP, but neither can boot, since bios does not know it has a hard drive! :cry

nor can much -ballyhoooed Ubuntu boot itself blindly. nor can it switch from "live cd" to "live HDD" !!! unbelievable. NOR can it simply put a switch menu on CD/DVD so one could select U from the menu and tell it to "go".

so now I'm chasing "how to image a running bootable XP on DVD"... more space to play with

 

Checksum error can point to failing cmos battery- is the date and time always wrong?- a replacement might well help, but I think that model is soldered in-any good at soldering- its fiddly, and I had a real pain trying it a few times-

 

live xp cd...works all the time...."Last xp":cool

 

i'm lost... what is 'live xp' and what is "last xp"... sp3 ?:-D

 

Well, this is all I'm going to say about this (my, there are alot of egg shells on these floors.) I was going through my friend's software and came upon a burned disc that was labled "Last XP" with a black marker. Well, I nuts for tweeking out xp anyway I can (I have seven so I'm not worried about screwing my os) The name sounded weird so I poped it in and my jaw dropped because I had never seen a disc like this. It's claim is that it's a "back up" disk with "extra" utilities I'm not going to glorify it, but it's a hacked version of xp pro with service pack 3 a bunch of utilities that fill in the many gaps that the multi-billion dollar, evil, greedy microsoft corporation was too stingy to give you with your $200 purchase (dvd codecs, burning software, pdf readers, driver packs, etc.) Personally, I'm glad someone stood up and made a fool of the software goliath, LOL! Well, this cd also gave you the option to boot into xp as a live cd. It boots from the cd and loads a barebones xp operating system into your computer's memory. It is the only practical live xp disk I have ever used. "Live CD" means that the operating system is on the dvd and not the hard drive. It loads into the memory (ram) just the way a hard drive will. I don't have the disc anymore. I don't know how to get it, but I do know that when I did use it, I never had to go to microsoft for anything:-D. But I'm sure it's illegal (just the same way ripping the tag off of a mattress would be) Yeah, you wouldn't want that:cool

 

i've seen some posts here and there of a 'recipe' for making Windows 98 or ME into a Live CD type, which would be of interest to a lot of people [especially criminal types...] but I never have seen even a claim of a live xp cd. that would be something to chat up for sure.

I don't think i've ever paid for XP, but had lots of systems with XP pro for "free" because the market is so littered with decent used machines with good COA stickers/license keys. I think i paid 59 bucks for the last one I bought.
Paid 80 for a system with Windows 7 Home Premium and its working like a trojan... What I'm rebelling against is expensive PC's!!

frankly i think MS did a good job of transforming the absolute DOG vista into Windows 7.

 

Seems like the infamous "Devil's Own" disk had extra stuff on it, as well as hacked .wpa code - I think I read that the D.O. guy is still serving time in a prison outside Redmond...

zapp: you were able to get the good data from the image, correct? Reason I ask: I've had to use Ontrack a couple of times through the years to pull the platters from dead drives, but your way sounds a lot less expensive...

 

I have my theory about that. First off, you got all these MIT grads, college grads, old school programmer, gurus...tons of experience tons of money...the software revolutionary god, bill gates (a sarcastic "whoa" on the later) and with all that resource, they couldn't get "Vista" right? Just like they couldn't get "Win Me" right? Remember all the promises of how much better "Me" is gonna be compared to the already stable "98"? Same promises with vista over a stable xp. Yet in both cases, the public got duped into seeing this eye candy (why would you wanna go back to the ugly duckling os?) and suckered into doing updates and service packs and they were none stop problem after problem...unsupported hardware, non existant drivers... And then (the clouds part and this ray of blinding sunshine hits the masses) "Yes! We've been saved...it's XP" or just recently, "it's Windows 7!" So microsoft dug their greedy arms into the consumer's pockets again kinda like a crack dealer, because, hey it's an addicting lifestyle, the internet is. It's not the microsoft certified blue collar workers that are behind this. It's not their customer support. It's microsoft's big wig boy's marketing scheme... And that there's the devil's own

 

Yes, I was able to save a complete image, transfer files over to a new, and d reuse the drive as a backup because it did not have damage other than the boot tracks were fried [apparently]. In other words, it would spin, and was able to go a bit longer.

I have to give credit to Paragon: Download the full Paragon free version Backup and Restore program for either 32 bit or 64 [diff version]. I made their boot Disk and used it. I hooked the 'dead' toshiba drive up to the mboard of another [not a notebook] system and booted their CD. My recollection is that at first it saw some sort of problem and gave me a choice, then it busted right through and made an image of the whole drive. All I wanted was the user data, and it was all fine. When paragon was done with it, it was obedient! I simply restored the data files to a new notebook that the lady bought, and gave them the old drive as a backup device.

 

not to divert to industry politik, but I'm not one that thinks linux will save Lady Liberty. All the linux distros have issues - they cannot be all things to all users/machines, and believe me, chasing the cheap end of the computer game with their cheap customers and cheap ratty hardware is not a good business to be in. That said, Windows 7 is microsoft's second "homerun", the first being Server 2000 which finally broke the stranglehold of proprietary servers in the farms that were building the web. Server 2003 was better.

Win7 is not expensive. Buy a decent used machine on Ebay for 80 bucks or so complete with a legit windows 7 Ultimate license and enjoy....

but big brother is going to own you no matter what. all client OS's in the future will be like "Back to the Future", the 'back' being back to X-term. Back to the client system being nothing more than a glorified terminal connected to the unseen hand of the Tyrants .... black helicopters ready to take you to the Gulag based on your i'net profile....

 

Well said