[ale] OT: Looking for some help with "locked" IBM Travelstar 30 Gig Laptop Hard Drive

[Van Loggins]

I got this off ebay for as a replacement drive for my Apple Powerbook G4 
500 MHz Titanium laptop that I am rebuilding.

To make a very long story short, This drive came out of an IBM Thinkpad 
that seller was parting out for parts on ebay. The seller didn't know 
that the drive had a password set on it while it was installed in the 
IBM laptop. No one knows what the password was set to so the drive is 
for all practical extents and purposes useless unless someone here can 
help me out with a procedure to erase the service cylinder on the drive 
which is where the password is stored according to all the info on the 
subject that I have found using the google search engine. I have found 
several services that offer a drive unlock service for this type of 
situation but all of them cost more than I can buy another laptop drive for.

I thought using DD to erase the drive might do the trick but I was 
wrong. Basically by having this lock in place on the drive it doesn't 
allow you to make changes to the MFT table so you can't create a new 
partition on the drive. Someone removed the partition on the drive 
without clearing the password.

Any ideas anyone? I'm currently using a 20 gig drive in my Powerbook, 
but it originally came with a 30 gig ibm travelstar drive so I would 
kind of like to put it back to the original specifications.

Thanks in advance.

Van

-- 
Van Loggins        vanloggins at gmail.com
		   HOME # 706-864-6739
		   Cell # 678-316-0136	                  

      _
     -o)
     /\\
    _\_v
 Linux User #316727