Locking a hard drive

Satsumomo

I remember reading once that you can lock hard drives, with a special code that goes in the actual firmware of the drive, or something along those lines, which makes the data completely inaccessible and that the only way of cracking one of these locks is sending the drive directly to the manufacturer.

Was I dreaming? I somehow remember seeing it here, but I couldn't find an answer or that thread with the search function.

I basically need to lockdown my computer. A BIOS password is too easily bypassed, and locking down Vista might lead to the hackee just wiping my data in a dumb attempt to reformat, etc.

System I want to lock is composed of 2 Western Digital drives running in RAID 0.

Tzyr

Looking around the web it seems that the examples I found, you can have a password that will be on the hard drive...but by resetting the motherboard would in turn reset the password on the hard drive.

Link.

Since I get the impression that someone who really wants your info could do something like, my only idea would be physically removing the hard drives when you are not using them and lock them in a safe or something. Though, since you are physically touching the hard drive, and depending on how often you want to do this, just be careful of wear; and careful on how you store the drives.

You can actually get cases where you have easy access to the drives in that you can add/remove them by just taking out the front panel and you do not need to worry about cables (since they are already there, you are just connecting the drives).

Just something to think about since you want to be really protective about your drives. Granted, it is hard to tell if you are protective of your stuff cause you want no one else to get access to it, or for you not to lose anything. The method I suggested would help with both, but for not losing your stuff, you would probably want raid-1 (so you have two drives with exactly the same info)....but I dunno what you want.

ronya

No, it exists, but it's impractical. And there's nothing stopping a dedicated attacker from just levering your disk platters out.

Just use truecrypt and encrypt the relevant partitions, it'll do what you want.

FyreWulff

It's way too easy to get the disks into an unlocked state. Keep in mind that the original Xbox used HDD locking to try and prevent people from getting into it. Also note how that did jack shit.

Just use Truecrypt, but the general rule of thumb is that physical possession of the computer is 'game over' anyway, but if you truecrypt it they will just be more inclined to format the computer when they fence it rather than go digging.

Topweasel

I think people are missing the real point.

Laptops and some desktop SATA drives support an HDD password. Without typing in this password the hard drive doesn't spin up. The problem is that this has to be supported by the Motherboard and the hard drive. This is not easy to break and requires the drive to be removed from the computer and hooked up to a device that could crack it while doing instantaneous restarts when it hits the third attempt fail safe. That fail safe is that it sends a signal stating that the Pword worked, and then it just doesn't spin requiring you to restart the system. More and more hard drives are being offered by dell with similar features but also encrypts the information, meaning without cracking the P word even a platter pull won't work.