ATATool is freeware software that is used to display and modify ATA disk information from a Microsoft Windows environment. The software is typically used to manage

host protected area The host protected area (HPA) is an area of a hard drive or solid-state drive that is not normally visible to an operating system. It was first introduced in the ATA-4 standard CXV (T13) in 2001. How it works The IDE controller has registers ...

(HPA) and

device configuration overlay Device configuration overlay (DCO) is a hidden area on many of today's hard disk drives (HDDs). Usually when information is stored in either the DCO or host protected area (HPA), it is not accessible by the BIOS (or UEFI), OS, or the user. Howeve ...

(DCO) features and is broadly similar to the

hdparm hdparm is a command line program for Linux to set and view ATA hard disk drive hardware parameters and test performance. It can set parameters such as drive caches, sleep mode, power management, acoustic management, and DMA settings. GParted ...

for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. The software can also be used to generate and sometimes repair

bad sector A bad sector in computing is a disk sector on a disk storage unit that is permanently damaged. Upon taking damage, all information stored on that sector is lost. When a bad sector is found and marked, the operating system like Windows or Linux will ...

s. Recent versions include support for DCO restore and freeze operations, HPA security (password) operations and simulated bad sectors.

Usage examples

ATATool must be run with administrator privileges. On

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

and later it requires an elevated-privileges command prompt (see

User Account Control User Account Control (UAC) is a mandatory access control enforcement feature introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 operating systems, with a more relaxed

). The target drive must be connected to a physical disk controller. The software cannot be used via a USB bridge or similar device. Display detected hard disks: ATATOOL /LIST Display information on hard disk 1: ATATOOL /INFO \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Set HPA to 10GB on hard disk 1 (volatile – will be lost on next power cycle): ATATOOL /SETHPA:10GB \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Set HPA to 10GB on hard disk 1 (non-volatile): ATATOOL /NONVOLATILEHPA /SETHPA:10GB \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Remove HPA to 10GB on hard disk 1 (non-volatile): ATATOOL /NONVOLATILEHPA /RESETHPA \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Set DCO to 5GB on hard disk 1: ATATOOL /SETDCO:5GB \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Remove DCO on hard disk 1: ATATOOL /RESTOREDCO:5GB \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Make sector 10 bad: ATATOOL /BADECC:10 \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Make sector 10 not bad: ATATOOL /FIXECC:10 \\.\PhysicalDrive1 Make sector 10 bad and then not bad again (alternative method): ATATOOL /BADECCLONG:10 \\.\PhysicalDrive1 ATATOOL /FIXECCLONG:10 \\.\PhysicalDrive1

Data safety

Use of the ATATool can permanently change the disk configuration, may result in permanent data loss by making some sectors of the disk inaccessible. The tool should therefore be used with extreme care.

References

External links

ATATool
AT Attachment Computer forensics {{Windows-software-stub

Usage examples

Data safety

See also

References

External links