November 20, 2013

How to Remove Hard Drive Password on Acer Laptop


A utility is provided in some laptops to lock a hard disk with a password. But these passwords are not the same as BIOS passwords sometimes. Maybe you can remove BIOS password just by moving battery from motherboard. However, the same way is not available for removing hard disk password because of these reasons:
  • Hard disk password is stored in the hard disk firmware and moves with the hard disk. 
  • If you add a new (unlocked) hard disk to a locked machine, it may lead to new hard disk to be locked. 
  • Note that hard disk lock passwords cannot be removed by reformatting the disk, formatting disk or any other software procedure (since the disk will not allow and reads or writes to the disk, it cannot be reformatted.)
So how to remove hard drive password? Take Acer laptop as an example according to two different situations. 

There is one possibility that BIOS password and hard disk lock passwords are set the same by a user and we can recover the BIOS password directly from the laptop security chip (after it is removed from the system board.) However, it is possible that the BIOS password and hard disk lock passwords may be set different. In this case the BIOS password will not unlock the hard disk. You can test to confirm if your hard disk is locked by attempting to access it in another laptop.

At this time, you should only remove HDD password with some password cracker when you have forgotten HDD password. If you still remember hard disk password, or you remember bios password is the same as hard drive password, follows the below to remove it. 
  1. Start your Acer laptop and hold on pressing F2
  2. Few seconds later, you will enter BIOS Setup Utility
  3. Press Page Up and Page Down key to choose Security option from menu
    You would see there are three password settings choices, Set Supervisor Password, Set User Password, Set HDD Password and Password on Boot.

   4.  Choose Set HDD Password, and a dialog window pops up.
   5.  Enter current password, and keep “Enter New Password” and “Confirm New Password” blank at the same time. 


   6.  Click F10 to save these changes.


  7.  Reboot Acer laptop again, you will find you can enter computer and access hard disk freely.

Related Articles:

No comments:

Post a Comment