HDD password not working

If that doesn’t work, there’s no convenient option here. Depending on the drive, there are two possibilities:

- If the drive does NOT use the HDD password to initialize its native hardware encryption, then the password can probably be bypassed, but it takes specialized software and/or labor techniques. But unless the data on that drive would justify the cost of such things because you don’t have a backup or something, then if you forgot the password, you may as well consider that drive dead.

- If the drive DOES use the HDD password to initialize hardware encryption, then there’s no way to get to the data without the password, but on the other hand, there’s usually a secure erase utility that makes it easy to regain use of the drive, as long as you’re ok wiping it.

Try entering the BIOS admin password as the current HDD password in the BIOS page to change it. Apparently on some Dell systems that can be used to change an unknown HDD password, as long as that drive’s HDD password was set on that system in the first place.