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** Reply to note from "King, Randall" <rjking@kodak.com> Mon, 26 Aug 1996 18:30:00 -0400 I don't recall where I saw it, but it is my understanding that there is an IDE and/or EIDE command which can be issued by the driver to the drive to tell it the password which has been chosen. I believe that it is up to the drive to decide whether that password matches the one which had been set (by another command). I do not believe that it is possible for the controller and/or driver to read the password back out. Also, I do not believe that the password is stored on EPROM. If it were, you couldn't change it on the fly. It *might* be in EEPROM. But, I think it's just as likely (more, really) that the information is stored on a drive-private location on the disk itself. I think that my beliefs (at least some of them) could be confirmed by checking the IDE/EIDE driver interface specification. With the spec, it should be possible to determine the maximum allowable length of the password. E.g., Is it an arbitrary string of text? A 32-bit quantity? A 64-bit quantity? Depending on what the password value is, it might become reasonably straight-forward (from driver code) to go into a drive password cracking mode, where passwords are tried and the drive checked for still being locked, in rapid succession. With a bit string of sufficient length, it might not be practical. Short-ish bit strings might very well be, though. If a character string, it might be good to use one of the general-purpose password cracking systems available, which use several dictionaries of English words, proper names, etc. Ron. cc: thinkpad@cs.utk.edu