Locked Tight

Q: I recently bought a new hard drive for my laptop. I have an IBM ThinkPad. Before I put the new hard drive in my laptop the laptop worked fine. I wanted to have a larger hard drive. The problem is that now my laptop will not boot up. All I see is a cone, a little number one, and a little pad lock on the screen. I have tried putting the old hard drive back in the laptop, but I still see the same thing. What is the problem? Why is this happening? How can I fix it?
Sari
A: It sounds to me that you are a victim of security. IBM ThinkPads can be strange fruit at times. Most people are use to user or administrator passwords when a computer boots up, but some ThinkPads have an extra security feature. IBM placed hard drive passwords as an option for some of their systems. This does provide an ounce of added security, but it also can add a pound of headache for system users.
IBM designed these passwords with the idea that if a laptop was stolen, the information on the hard drive would not be accessible. In and of itself, that is a very good concept, but as a matter of practicality it is not as good of an idea. The problem with hard drive passwords is that there is no backdoor. Normally, most password systems are designed with a backdoor feature that will allow you to access your computer in the event that you forgot your password. IBM omitted this feature in the design of hard drive passwords. This translates into a situation where if you forgot the password for your hard drive, then you are toast.
When you install a hard drive that has a password on it then that password will be required before the computer will even boot up. I believe that in your case that you may have purchased a hard drive that was password protected. You can know with certainty by looking into your computer’s system settings. Press the “F1” key. Once in the system settings, you should see a header named “System Security”. Highlight this header by using the arrow keys to navigate down to it and press the “Enter” key. If you see the word “Present” in brackets next to the hard disk password option, then your hard drive is password protected and the password can’t be disabled or changed without entering the current password.
Your options are few and they can be expensive. The password for the hard drive is stored on the hard drive itself. It is stored in an area that is not readily accessible to users. This fact makes it difficult to reset or circumvent the hard drive password. There are companies like Nortek (www.nortek.on.ca) that claim to reset or disable the hard drive password, for a fee of course. Your other option is to have a new hard drive put into your laptop.