Dell Inspiron 1520, Part II

Well, while attacks on BIOS "regular" unknown passwords were successful, guessing HDD password by hashes didn't work well. Whom I kidding here? It didn't work at all: out of BIOS hackers who needs to update a decode solution or post Master Password of an Seagate HDD lock of a 6 years old laptop anyway.

GParted/GPart from a USB Ubuntu stick wouldn't create a new partition(s), Hiren's Boot CD won't wipe this HDD. Sure, after a week of hard labour of searching and booting all these "magic" password clear utilities I started to realize I don't need somebody's Windows Vista Home installation for anything, even if unencrypted and unprotected by Windows password.

Swapped the original 120 GB Seagate SATA drive by 160 GB discard from a broken laptop, and everything works fine now. Tons of online instructions and "experts" regularly forget to tell that crypto chip for HDD resides on HDD itself, and not in BIOS NVRAM. It happend to be true at least for my Dell Inspiron 1520.

Sure, I might replace the whole keyboard on my 1520, as replacing just one key might be cumbersome if cheaper. Laptop might need another stick with 2 GB of RAM and vacuuming. Oh, and a key "Y" from my discarded HP keyboard is incompatible. No use for it in my Dell Inspiron 1520 except for showing it off as on the photo above.