Remove/Crack HDD Password

Hey everyone! It's been years since I've posted on here.

I know this may sound like the classic "I forgot my password can you help me hack it" excuse for hacking someones computer, but it's a legitimate situation.

A friend of mine brought me his laptop the other day and said that "somehow" a password got set on his laptop and he can't access it. I figured, easy pickens, windows passwords are no problem. Well, come to find out, it's a HDD boot password. I don't have any experience removing or cracking these. Let me point out, it is a HDD boot password, NOT a BIOS password.

I removed the drive and hooked it up to my computer, it attaches and shows up in the disk management, but it's showing as an unformatted drive.

Anyone have any experience or tips on how to go about this? I'm still researching online as well as asking on here, so please don't tell me to go Google it, cause I am :) I'm trying to find software I can install so that I can at least try to start entering passwords to unlock the drive rather than the "3 attempt then reboot" limitation when it's in the laptop it came out of (older Toshiba Satellite).

PS, the HDD is a Toshiba MK3021GAS

In a situation like this I myself use HDD Unlock Wizard, A little pricey but works well. There is a chance of hot swapping the drive to fake out the original password though, Try this first:

Pull your Hdd out of the laptop. Power on the unit. Enter the bios set-up. You will see no Hdd drive listed. Select manual from your Hdd options and reinstall the Hdd. Go back to the Hdd options and change it to auto. Go to the security settings and set a new password then reboot. Try your new password.

Note: There is always a possibility of hardware damage when hot swapping.

If all else fails try downloading MHDD, it's a free utility for hard drives and works pretty damn good. ATAPWD is another free app. but not nearly as good as MHDD.

Post back with any problems.