HDAT2 forum

Posting this as helper to future people who are trying to navigate the Cryptic nature of this application. Mind you, its a great application, but it is not very intuative on how to use it.

I was working on installing a new Sata drive, and when it rebooted to clone Bios went to lunch. When I reset BIOS, somehow HPA got turned on. Mind you, until I came across HDAT forums no other utilities bothered to indicate or share this as the source for the problem. Kudos on that one.

Biggest advise, make a -allow changes- or something simple menu option that initiates all the things needed to unlock/enable/unfreeze everything. And include in the menu of this the tip about removing the IDE cable for bootup.

So, if you have this problem here is what I did to fix it step by step ( By memory, so I might be off a little, but you will get the idea)

Power Down PC
Remove IDE cable from HDD, leave power connected
Boot to HDAT2 floppy
Connect IDE cable to HDD
Run HDAT2 software
Select the HDD in question and press Enter
Arrow down to Security and press Enter
Press Enter on the Set Password option
Press P to set a password
Type something you will remember, I used bob and press enter
Press S to Set
Arrow down to unlock and press Enter
Arrow down to unlock device and press Enter
Esc to main menu
Arrow down to the Set Max menu and press Enter
Arrow down to set password and press enter
P, put in an easy password, S to set
Arrow down to Unlock and press Enter
Arrow to Set Max Address and press Enter
You would think just setting to LBA max with S would work.
Not sure why, but reverse logic is what works
I set the drive to 28bit more and whala HPA was successfully removed
When you exit the Set Max menu HDAT2 will rescan the drives and show no HPA
Reboot and verify your Bios/Cmos agrees with it

Dunno if this will fix everyone, but this ended a 4 day, 15+ hour battle to fix the issue with the drive. Mind you most of that was using a partition recovery software to restore files before I focused on the Bios detection issue.

** Edit**
After its fixed you need to go backin and Remove the Password in the Security screen or no other apps will be able to
setup partitions

**Edit**

Happy Patitioning

What have happened is that your BIOS have frozen the security commands at boot up, so that when HDAT tryed to issue the ATA commands to the drive, it was already security frozen and didn't work.
Removind IDE cable is not the best option, it's far better to remove the power cable only and plug that after boot up the system, but be carefull to not plug the molex on the oposite direction otherwise you will be applying 12V to the 5v line and burn the PCB and pre-amp inside the drive assembly.
So here is the simple way :
Power down PC.
Remove POWER cable, leave IDE cable and drive on slave position.
Boot your windows OS, BIOS will issue the command to frozend the drive security but the drive will not be powered and will not acept the command.
With windows running, plug the power to the drive you want to remove HPA. Again, plug the molex correctly (or the sata power cable), even if the molex plug doen't fit if incorrectly inserted, it the metal make contact with the power line on oposite derections, the PCB of the hard drive will be damaged and the pre-amp inside the drive will be burn too, so you will need a head stack replacement and it will not be easy to fix.
Now with your slave drive spinning run the HDD Capacity Restore tool from HDD Guru.
Your drive should return to native size and you don't have to mess arround with passwords ....

If you have a PC-3000 or HRT you can do it the easy way .... also you will be able to power on/off the drive without having to plug the cables with the system running.
Those cards have the hability to cut the power to the drive and re-aply power to the drive and you can do that with a click of the mouse.

Hi,

to remove HPA you don't need to set any password(s).
If your drive is frozen (BIOS) just remove data (or power) cable, power on,
then reconnect data (or power) cable and in program just remove HPA area.
But this doesn't works for SATA drives.

I am working on new menu item "Hidden areas"
and I hope it will be simpler.