Hi, as neither harddisk makers nor BIOS makers really seem to care about users getting locked out of their own disks, you might want to have a look at this article:
http://www.heise.de/ct/english/05/08/172/ Years ago, IDE / ATA harddisks started to support a password lock feature, but nobody really used it. Well, probably the X-BOX is using it. Anyway. The problem: A virus or trojan can set a random password for your harddisk, with the effect that you never get back access to your data. If you are lucky, you can use "the reset password and format disk" function to get at least the hardware back. As far as I know, no harddisk vendors have yet taken the effort to add a simple jumper to block password changes - really a pity. That kind of jumper works pretty good to protect your flash BIOS on a lot of mainboards out there... However, at least a few BIOS makers have included "freeze password access at boot time", but the "freeze" only has effect until the next disk reset. If a trojan or virus can get access to the raw disk to mess with password features, then it will probably be able to trigger a disk reset, too. Again zero protection :-(. The only real protection at the moment is: Set a disk password yourself. But then, you need a BIOS which gives you an interface to unlock the disk every time you boot... Or you have to boot from diskette or USB to unlock your harddisk every time you boot. Really crappy situation. Especially given that this potentially disastrous feature got introduced roughly SEVEN years ago! In Linux, you can use hdparm to control the password feature, and in DOS, you can use tools like ATAPWD. Eric ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
