Any way to unlock a locked hard drive?

[Roberty]

A friend of mine had a hard drive password on his old laptop and since he hasn't used it in awhile he forgot the password. Any way to remove the password or unlock it? He doesn't really need any of the data off of it so it doesn't matter if it erases it. Anyone have any ideas of any programs that can do this that are cheap or free? I've got the hard drive hooked up to an old test computer right now and been trying different programs on Hirams Boot Disk v10.1 with no luck so far.

 

[nitrobass24]

this is what i have used in the past

http://www.hddunlock.com/

 

[Roberty]

this is what i have used in the past

http://www.hddunlock.com/

I had been looking at that. Decided to do it and it worked like a champ. Took about an hour and a half to run but it unlocked it. Word of warning though - it low level formats the HD along with whatever it had to do to unlock it so you won't be recovering any data off of it afterwards. Saved the HD though which was all I wanted to do.