Hi all,

First of all, congratulations to the Ultimate Boot CD creators. Putting all those useful tools together is an excellent idea.

My request is the following one :

I discovered the atapwd (ATA Password) tool which can set password at the hard-disk controller level. In facts, I would like to allow/disallow users (of my family) to access one disk or one other.

In order to do this, I would like to write a DOS menu GUI which would ask the user for a password for booting a specified disk. In order to do this, I would need a command line version of a tool like "atapwd" (the GUI is blocking and not really easy to use for a novice) which would be invoked by my DOS GUI.

Do you know if a command-line only version of atapwd exists ?

Do you know if an equivalent tool (ATA password settings) using the command line exist ?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Just to inform the community:

I searched Google and finally found the hdparm Linux tool which does exactly what I want and I also found a Win32 version of hdparm:

http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm

This is powerful (and dangerous) because it has many options and it allows setting a HDD ATA-3 security password from Windows.
The only problem is it need Windows loaded to work (it is based on Kernel32 and Ntdll)
Perhaps, the Linux version of hdparm associated with a minimal fast-booting Linux kernel could be added to UBCD : this is just a suggestion (perhaps it is already in UBCD even if I did not find it yet)

Your hdparam link does not work. I'm not sure why, but it seems that the lack of a "/" at the end is causing it to add another string of "/hdparm" to the end, causing a 404 error. Here's a working link.

http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/

Or, of course, Google

http://www.google.com/search?q=hdparm
http://www.google.com/search?q=hdparm+win32

Thanks for the info.

I do wish someone would translate the ATAPWD docs from Russian to English. ATAPWD can be found anywhere on Google as well.

http://www.google.com/search?q=atapwd

Try http://translate.google.com/translate_t to translate the docs.