Questions and Answers

I've heard that it is impossible to unlock a hard drive without having the correct password, how is it possible that your software does that?

Many years of research and development allowed us to get into the firmware area where hard drives store passwords. Some hard drives store passwords in plain text, other encrypt them, but if we can read/write that area, then we can easily re-set the password whether it is encrypted or not. Repair Station and HDD Unlock Wizard work that way. More details are available here.

Is Repair Station safe to my data?

Repair Station is absolutely safe to your data since it does not access (read or write) the area where your data is stored.

What if I have a laptop which does not allow me to boot asking for a password? How do I run Repair Station in this case?

You will have to remove the hard drive out of the laptop and attach it to a generic desktop PC. Please note that IDE hard drives for laptops require a special 2.5-inch 44-pin to 3.5-inch 40-pin adapter. Serial ATA hard drives do not require any adapters.

Please see this page for more details.

Why doesn't Repair Station recognize hard drives attached via USB and FireWire enclosures/adapters?

We realize it would be so easy and convenient to use such an enclosure or adapter, but unfortunately technical limitations of such adapters do not allow Repair Station to access Firmware Area of the hard drive making the unlocking processes impossible. We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but this is beyond our control. For details, please see this page.

My computer does not boot when I attach the hard drive as Master (applies to IDE hard drives only).

Repair Station can only access hard drives that operate in Master mode. Furthermore, there has to be no other (slave) devices on the same cable. This is required because of some technical limitations of the IDE interface.

If your motherboard has only one IDE connector, and your boot drive requires an IDE port, then you have three options:

Use another PC
Move Operating System to a S-ATA hard drive
Use an additional PCI RAID/extension board with IDE connectors (in this case you will have to attach your boot hard drive to the extension board).

What if I cannot find my hard drive in your list of supported drives?

Please note that we are constantly working on adding support for new hard drives to Repair Station, so our supported drives list is far from being complete. To find out whether a specific hard drive is supported, we highly recommend you to run Repair Station and diagnose your hard drive (diagnostics is free). Repair Station will prepare a short summary; it will let you know whether hard drive is unlockable or not.

I'd like to use Repair Station but my firewall blocks outgoing TCP connections. What TCP ports should I allow for Repair Station?

Repair Station uses a single TCP port: 5531. It connects to the following host name: hdd-tools.com.

When I was unlocking a hard drive, connection to the server got dropped. Would you count this as a successful unlock?

Our system counts only finished and fully diagnosed unlocks. You can simply re-connect and start the unlocking process again.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any question or concern.

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