[ltp] Thinkpad 760XL - Locked Drive

[Barry L. Kline]

On Saturday 20 November 2004 10:31 pm, Eben King wrote:

> How on earth did he wind up with a locked drive that's not from a hot
> laptop?

It's not difficult.  I have a friend who had his TP 600e lock up and it 
wouldn't turn off when he held the power key.  So he got the bright idea to 
pull the power supply and eject the battery.  The result?  A totally useless 
motherboard AND drive.  The machine would no longer boot without a password, 
so we found a used motherboard on eBay and I replaced that for him.  Then 
machine would boot but would ask for the password for the hard drive before 
actually getting to the OS.  I wasn't able to get to the information no 
matter what I tried, including putting the drive into a desktop machine.

He had never entered passwords for booting or hard drive yet both were locked.  
He ended up replacing the drive, too.  Good thing he had decent backups.

Word to the wise:  NEVER pull the power/battery from a machine that's running 
as you may have this happen to you.

Barry