Like 2+ months ago my girlfriend’s friend asked me if I knew how to fix her laptop. She had been using and then after a reboot it said “Enter HDD Password”. This notebook was a Toshiba Satellite.

I had never worked on this brand before so I couldn’t troubleshoot on the phone and had her leave the laptop with me. 2+ months later I actually take a look at it.

Symptoms:

Spends approx. 2 mins on the Toshiba POST screen… SLOW! Has faint HDD spinup/spindown sound. Finally advances to say “Enter HDD Password”.

The owner claimed that she did not intentionally enter an HDD password but did acknowledge that she might have without realizing what she had done.

HDD Passwords can’t be cracked:

Or so is the rumor. Anyways, I did a few searches on the net and sure enough the only way to crack the HDD password on that model is to send it to a Toshiba authorized repair center.

Whats that sound:

At this point I decide to turn my stereo off. Now I can hear a faint sound of HDD death! So I pulled the drive out and put one of my laptop’s drives in. Turn the Toshiba on and it nearly instantly passes the Toshiba POST screen and then gives me the missing NTLDR message. Good that’s what its supposed to do. Then I decided to put he deadish Toshiba drive in my laptop’s second drive bay. When I put the drive in it has the sound of HDD death even louder. Attempt after attempt to successfully spin up but eventually it gives up.

In Summary:

If your Toshiba laptop suddenly starts asking for a HDD password at boot but you don’t remember setting one… Your hard disk drive could be dead. This is a little more comforting than thinking your an idiot, right?