Inspiron 6000 - Hard Drive Password

Question

Hello, I have recently been helping restore my girl friends Dell Inspiron 6000. A while back she put a system password and a hard drive password onto the system, as she was headed to college. However, as it stays in house most of the time, we both agreed (we both use it) to just remove those as they were a pain to enter when booting up. I restored XP and got it working, then booted into the BIOS to remove the passwords. Under "Security" I removed all the passwords by entering the old password and then clicking enter for the new password which then changes the password to "Not Set".

Assuming all was working I rebooted and still got asked for a Hard Disk password. When I tried the old password (that had previously worked just fine) it did not work. I also tried just Enter to see if that worked by no luck. In hopes that it was just a BIOS problem I removed the CMOS battery and let everything drain for a while, then reinstalled the battery and rebooted. The BIOS was all reset but I am still being asked for the Hard Disk Password, and the old password still does not work. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks, Steven

Message Edited by SMichaelis on 10-11-2007 11:43 AM

ejn63 · Answer

Try just pressing ENTER when prompted. On some drives, once a password is set, it can't be removed - you can then use a blank one, but you cannot completely remove it.

SMichaelis · Answer

Unfortunately I tried that too, and it doesn't work either. Thanks for the suggestion though. Any other ideas?

jwhiteheadcc · Answer

If your drive still allows the master password, you can contact Dell with proof of ownership and they'll help.  They just have you enter that one instead, but it sounds likes you shouldn't have to do that.  I guess it's time to call Dell up.  The master password is NOT the same for all drives, BTW.  If your drive's firmware is thinking you have a password and you don't you'll likely have to just use the reformat option they can provide.  There are no backdoors - you'll either need a password or reformat to get that drive back.  The alternative is a data recovery company and $$$$.

esmith92000 · Answer

What you can do is what I did to get everything back on my wife's Windows XP machine when it died. I built a bootable version of Windows XP on a key disk. THis was some work, but gave me a key disk I can put into any Windows XP machine and boot it. The directions for building the USB key disk are at

http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8

Then you insert that, power on, and hit F12 until it lets you change the boot device to the USB disk. Boot from that, attach another USB disk you can get from Costco cheap, and copy everything over from the dead disk to the Costco disk. Then install XP again onto the dead disk, boot it, do all the upgrades since you got your XP CD, and then copy back from the Costco disk whatever documents she needs. This was a two day job for me, but in the end it worked. The Dell people were less than helpful on this, and insisted the only way to do this was to reinstall XP and lose everything on the disk. Not an option.

townsendtailsta · Answer

I brought a used dell inspiron 6000 but need bios password or admin password how can I get these it is a xp my email is [Admin NOTE: Email ID removed per TOU policy]

ejn63 · Answer

Ask the seller -- if they can't provide the passwords, return the system for  a refund.

Pholone · Answer

Pls,can I get the Hard Drive password? Thank you.

Storage, Drives & Media

Inspiron 6000 - Hard Drive Password

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