NuXPeR
04-19-2006, 01:30 PM
I recently dropped my Acer TravelMate 290 notebook and it is damaged beyond repair. Based on the cost quoted to me by a local computer repair shop, I decided that it was a good time to upgrade my system to an Acer Ferrari, which I am quite pleased with. I was hoping to at least salvage the hard drive from my TravelMate since it's an 80GB Seagate Momentus. I also own an older Dell notebook which only has a 20GB hard drive, so I was hoping to use the 80GB drive in that system. Problem is, when I installed the hard drive in the Dell it was still password locked. Not a problem I thought because I did have my TravelMate secured with both a Power-On password, Supervisor password and had selected the option in the bios to "Lock" the hard drive. I never actually had the option to choose a specific hard drive password. My Power-On password and Supervisor passwords were both set to be "304999" but when I enterred this password for the hard disk password I was told that it is incorrect. After enterring this password three times I was then prompted to enter a "Master Hard Disk" password, which again was not the password I had originally setup. My thoughts on this are that the TravelMate bios is setup to automatically assign a hard disk password when you select the "Lock" hard disk option in the bios. Then when you enter the Power-On or Supervisor bios passwords it will automatically unlock the hard drive. So my question to you is, what could this password be? Or what is the default "Master Hard Disk" password for the Seagate Momentus hard drives? Anyone ever here of this or know how to fix it? I'm guessing I'll end up trashing the hard drive, but I would really rather not do that. Thanks!!!