In this case it’s an “Apacer” drive… some no name brand. It seems unlikely that I would be able to track down a responsive customer service worker. Seems like really a long-shot because even if I reach someone they will consider it a waste of their time and money that they are even talking to someone well after a warranty period is over. And from there, anything that enables someone to put a product back into service rather than buy a new drive is probably treated as a trade secret. Perhaps some social engineering could be used to reach an employee disgruntled enough to help.

Hard drive passwords are removeable. The nuts and bolts of it is performing a change password operation where the new password is the NULL char.

If it were true that a password is required to write to the storage medium in the event of corruption, that would imply that it’s required for every write event.

Consider how OPAL drives have passwords just to get read access. You only have to enter the password once when the controller first powers up the drive. It does not have to send the password with every read operation because the drive remains unlocked until it powers off.

But I have to say I’m hand-waving because I only heard speculation that a password is used for write-access gate-keeping to begin with. Certainly it’s feasible that the ATA standard could have included a separate password for write access, but my question is whether that’s actually the case.