This also reminds me of a discussion I had with flyback, a freenode regular, on IRC recently. I didn’t have a logic analyzer at that point so I had to buy a mod chip. I was told I either needed to sniff the PW from the IDE bus directly (in plaintext) or buy a mod chip. …reminds me of when I unlocked the disk, and then didn’t write down the password that it needed to be relocked with.
