cannot remove E1405 HPA - bios security freeze

Hi,
I want to remove the inbuilt HPA that came with my E1405 (bought may 2006) because I hate the dell mediadirect - its absolutely no use. But when I try to use the tool to remove hpa, it says the bios has a security freeze onthe harddisk, so no permanent changes can be made. On seeing the bios settings however at bootup, there are no passwords set or security freeze settings that I can control.

Has anyone attempted removing the bios security freeze? Any ideas how I can do it without loss of data, and without removing the hdd and putting it in another computer?

Thanks

 

Assuming you are talking about the Media Direct HPA, there is a tool by hitachi feature tool that removes the HPA. To my knowledge this is the only tool that will remove the HPA, and does not give any errors.

I haven't tried this, but here is the link:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

 

I tried using this tool, as well as the HDAT2 tool. Both remove it only temporarily. As soon as you power cycle, changes are lost..

 

after you remove the hpa, you have to format it before reboot so it does not come back.

 

That's correct. You did the first half of the fix but missed the second part.

The Dell MBR calls special code in LBA Sector 3 to re-enable the HPA anytime you boot from the hard disk. After you unhide the HPA, in order for it to stay unhidden you need to either get rid of the Dell MBR (so LBA-3 doesn't get called) or you need to disable LBA-3. See this thread for further details.

 

Has anyone found a solution to this? I have tried several different tools that are supposed to get rid of the hpa, and am having the same problem. They either do not work, sometimes saying something about the hdd's frozen status, or are only able to overwrite the hpa "temporarily", which gets undone as soon as the computer is rebooted.

I think that the problem is with the bios rather than with dell resetting the hpa, because I have wiped my hdd completely (which I assume zeroes out lba-3) and am using the microsoft mbr rather than the dell one.

Some websites have stated that this can be accomplished if you perform the hpa-removing operation on a different computer, but this is a notebook and I'm not sure I want to open it up to hook the hdd up to another computer.

Otherwise, I've tried starting up the windows xp installation cd right after I wipe the hpa without turning off the computer, but I'm not sure how to do this? As I'm not sure how to boot the cd without turning it off, pressing F12 at the dell, and choosing to boot from the CD, but this obviously turns off the computer and removes the temporary hpa fix.

Any ideas?

 

thanks dg1261...it worked like a charm!