Hi guys,

My brother had been given an old HP ex-workplace pc a year ago which he never used or even turned on. Today he gave it to my other brother who asked me to check it over, problem is it seems the hard drive is locked. I had no experience of HP, and this pc has a key lock located on the case front adjacent to the hard drive - I assume this is one of the problems.

I tried putting in a spare hard drive I had to check if this was the only problem, but alas, it still would not boot.

I know this is a long shot, but does anyone know how to disable the now unnecessary security on the pc? I'm sure the bios will be involved in hardware checks also, but I'm not great in bios either.

If you need anymore information I can suppy it. If the worst comes to the worst I will put it in to a pc repair shop.

Sorry if the info is vauge, but as I said, I have no experience of pc security outside of firewall/antivirus etc, all i know is the pc has a keylock and hardware checks which I need to disable to make the pc usable.

Thanks for any advise in advance..

Vince

EEEE I'll take a shot.
The password is stored on the hd (controller card)not the platter and not in the bios.
Without the password the hd is useless.

Unless you can find an exact duplicate of the hard drive and replace the controller card inside your only option is ask your brother to remember the password....probably his name. lol

I think you will get about 4 tries before the hd locks you out from further attempts.....until you reboot.

No amount of formatting ...even low formatting is going to get rid of the password protection.

Won't boot with new hd. Pull the cmos battery for a few minutes and install a different hd as master and set up to boot a:, cdrom then C:

Use a 98 startup floppy and the old hd as a paper weight.

Wish I could offer a better answer.
Bet some one has one.

W.L.

Did edit this response..I think I crossed the very thin line on what is allowed here. Sorry about that.