I know that Iluvpu55y was asking something similar but our circumstances (at the very least) are very different. I bougfht a used Thinkpad from a girl who was selling it because she had broken the screen. She took out the memory and I took the thing apart (I paid $200- an investment in my education) and we were both happy. So now a few months later I have a new Dell Latitude C400 and I'm thinking I would like to use the old Thinkpad's hard drive as an extra drive so I pop it in and, yes, the password protection thing comes up. I don't know what the password is. I haven't even tried to boot from floppy or cd to format it yet (can I even do that?) and I would like to know if anybody has any idea how to get around the password. I would rather try to do that than format it right away because, frankly, I'm curious. Who could pass up 20 Gigs of stuff if there was a way not to? I read the manual, it seems pretty secure. I got the list of IBM bios default passwords, but those are for their computers, not components. Can anyone help? Oh, and the girl and I are no longer speaking.