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Unlocking a Travelstar 2.5" HDD?
Rogerborg writes "So, I buy a used 6.5Gb IBM Travelstar on eBay, only to find that I didn't caveat emptor enough, and it's password protected. No problem, I'll just, uh... uh... what will I do? According to this discussion at geek.com, the password is stored on the platter, not the controller, so swapping controllers won't help. If the controller finds a password, it refuses all access to the disk. Mounting the drive as a slave in an IDE converter, I can't fdisk, format or otherwise access it under Linux. DOS won't even recognize that the drive is there. I've even tried it in a freaky system running VxWorks. The drive mounts, but can't be accessed or formatted." How rude! Are there any utils out there that can be used to unlock the device so it can be used?
"The IBM tech sheet for a similar drive notes that there is a "security erase unit" command... but it's also password protected! I can't find any further info on the IBM site, but apparently their recommendation is to use password locked Travelstars as paperweights.
"Nortek can remove the password from Travelstars using black magic and chicken sacrifices (or a custom controller?) but will charge more than the price of the drive for even for a basic unlock that destroys the data.
I have to admit that I'm impressed by this security, but it renders the drive useless far too easily. Can Slashdot suggest any way to remove the password (the data can go too), short of degaussing the platters or building a custom controller?"
bottom line is -- youre really fucked. its too cheap of a disk to be worth the hassle. just go get another.
on the other hand, if you want to struggle and you have plenty of free time :
Look for an eeprom which is located on the underside of the planar near the main power connector. The chip is typically marked C46C1 - ST 39AD. It is an 8 pin package and holds the security supervisor data and the code required to unlock the embedded code on the hard drive. Replace this chip with a clean one from an unlocked laptop drive (you can burn it with a serial eeprom writer) and you should be able to format the drive. Note that you need to disassemble the housing of the drive and maybe 30% of the drive itself to get at the chip.
Someone claims that a program called 'zap' from IBM will do it.
It's response number 16.
Enjoy,
Indie rock lives! b-side!
Why don't you ask the seller what the password is?
Personally, if you've already contacted the seller on ebay to see if they know and that failed. You could ask for a refund or give negative feekback for selling a bum drive (if you can't use it with compatible equipment, it's dead in my book). But as a last resort, you could always try a big hefty magnet to zap it. I don't know how that would affect any eeprom or anything of that sort, but it's a good last resort.
Nice big bar magnet oughta take care of that problem. But, would it effect the chips or anything?
Several HDDs I have taken apart have a small flash ROM or EEPROM or some other such small memory-storing chip, located in the same container as the physical drive platters. There's the EEPROM, some resistors, and the drive servo. I don't know about IBM drives; but it probably is stored in one of those chips. Per the geek.com discussion, it seems IBM won't be terribly helpful with it, but I'm sure somebody, somewhere, has written a reflasher for the drive. The question is finding that person...
Anyone know of a place I could purchase hard-drives with this type of hardware-level password protection for a desktop system? I'd put one of those onto my documents drive and keep it safe from prying family members while I was out.
You could try brute forcing the password somehow and hope that the luser that locked it didn't know anything about security and had a password = 6 chars.
...or from some other shady source. I doubt if the seller ever got this thing to work, other than powering it up and seeing that it was locked.
It sounds very suspicious to me. I've had friends who have had their car windows smashed so their company laptops could be 'appropriated'. Stereo, CD collection, etc. were left untouched.
My personal paranoia and suspicions aside, who would sell their HD to a stranger *without* first wiping the disk?
Why do people purchase junk like this? The best thing to do with a used HD is throw it in the garbage. If you want a cheap HD, you can buy a brand new 10GB Travelstar for $81 shipped:. jsp?ProductCode=712553-017
http://www.googlegear.com/ggweb/jsp/ProductDetail
-nb
The IBM Travelstar series has ATAPI commands which can protect the drive. If you don't supply the password to a locked drive you won't even see the drive. The firmware on the drive has a 5 counts and you're out system to slow down brute forcers. If you get it wrong 5 times you need to power down to reset the drive. There are no jumpers to short out and no utilities to bypass the mechanism. If you can't see the drive how are you supposed to use a utility to speak to it ?
Think caps on people... let's hear some intelligent replies.
and harass the bejiznitz out of the seller. Heck, I'm up to my 3rd account because of idiot buyers who ruined my name (and got me banned) on false claims just because they were from overseas. At least you'd have an honest reason to slam the guy/gal/thing and maybe get enough insurance money to get the thing unlocked (or buy a much larger drive and toss the locked one)
:)
Or better yet : sell the drive on ebay
-Billco, Fnarg.com
For this kind of thing, I use PGPdisk. Let's you allocate space into an encrypted pseudodrive. Much more secure than a simple password-protected drive. As long as your software is uncomprimised, it's totally non-hackable. But don't lose your pass phrase!!!
A while back i was looking through IBM's specs for their deskstar drives, and it appears that they all support the same levels of password protection as their travelstar line of HD's. That is to say they all support a user and supervisor password, with multiple levels of security. (both user and supervisor passwords could be set to allow access to data, or it could be set such that only the user password could access the data, with the supervisor password needed to re-initialize the drive.)
Kind of a moot point, as most bios's have no support for this type of thing.
Perhaps IBM commercial sales have some systems that support these levels of desktop HD passwords.
Here's a page from IBM listing the control commands for their Deskstar line of drives:
o m.htm
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/dtla/dtlac
I'm sure there's a PDF floating around on their site, but i can't find it right now. Have a gander at the Security set password and Security unlock fields.
Perhaps someone will be able to write a utility to lock a desktop HD when users go on vacation or something. (not sure how the BIOS would handle a locked drive though.)
There's some food for thought.
Basic and industrial strength versions!
sulli
RTFJ.
Alternatively, it's possible that IBM just included a default, fallback password. I read somewhere that nearly every BIOS has a "cheat" password. Of course, motherboards aren't used to store your company's most valuable data....
Laptop drives do not function as slaves. That is why it didn't get detected. Stick it as a master on your second IDE bus and..
dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hdb1
$85 later... or
YOU MUST SUPPLY POWER TO THE HDD THEN SHORT OUT J11 J15 SHUT DOWN AND FDISK THEN FORMAT AND YOUR READFY TO GO
For the benefit of the archives, a last post from the article submitter:
I found a solution. The solution came in the form of a very nice man that I met on another discussion forum who, free and gratis, removed the password after I posted the drive to him. He also managed to tell me that what the password had been set to, and what kind of laptop the drive was in when it was locked.
How did he do it? He won't say. I think that he works for a shop that does this commercially, so I'll respect that and not mention his name or the shop that I think he works for. All I can say is that from our conversations, I suspect that with access to a custom drive controller, this is a thirty second operation, but that it does absolutely require modified hardware, and that there is, and never will be a software solution.
Thanks to all who contributed, and good luck with your own hacking and hardware reuse. ;-)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.