Unlock locked drives?

I have a couple dozen recovered hard drives. I just discovered two of them are locked. Putting them in a rehabbed laptop, that shows up on boot. God knows what the passwords are.
Diskpart and Disk management won’t unlock them, putting them in a SATA-USB holder they don’t even show in Explorer.
All the searching online comes up with moronic answers (just enter the password you don’t goddam know) or very sketchy sites for supposed commercial software.
Anyone know any tricks?
They’re spinners so I don’t mind tossing them but I’m stubborn to know how to remedy them.

Do you want to use them as blank drives, or to recover the data?

To use them, try some different operating systems :slight_smile: I’ve been able to “unlock” drives using Linux and MacOS. At one point I couldn’t get one drive to unlock at all, so I put it in my Drobo, and it erased it no problem.

Don’t care what’s on them, just reuse them. Didn’t find a single post saying it was possible to unlock them with a different OS so I haven’t tried. I’ll try gparted on the Pi when I get the chance.
I have LOTS of spinner drives, I just marked those two and used another one.

Nah, didn’t work with Mac OS or Linux. They aren’t even seen by the OS. Might as well toss them.

Maybe try a BSD ISO? Perhaps OpenBSD or FreeBSD?

Ah they’re hardware locked :frowning:

What’s the model #?

WD and a Hitachi the WD lock program sees that as a WD, but doesn’t work on either. Only lets you change the password by first entering the one I don’t know.
I will throw them away. They are garbage. I wouldn’t use a spinner myself* and I curse customers who bring me their “new” computer with the 1 TB spinner that’s slower than the Second Coming.

*use them only for a backup drive and both the locked ones are only 500GB