I bought a laptop off of Ebay that was lightly used. Gateway, 80gb HD, Vista, 1GB of ram....when I got it today it asked for a HDD password or a HDD master password? How would you get around that if I don't know the passcode? Then, after i try different numbers, it says HDD locked, and a screen comes up that says no operating system found. Not sure on what to do next. Thanks for the help.
You may want to try to contact Gateway. We had a Dell Laptop that gave the "no operating system found" message as soon as we received it. It didn't ask for any HDD passcodes though. We contacted Dell and they explained that the hard drives are very fragile and on rare occassion break during shipment. They sent us a replacement hard drive the next day that took care of the problem.
You may also want to contact Windows. Sometimes Window can activate it as well. Because I had dell laptop as well and I called Windows and they activated it for me.