Acer aspire one with a locked hard drive, help anyone?

REminds of of the xbox 1 password lock down

It used a simlar thing to stop u swapping out the hardrives

 

had this issue on a old dell laptop, only way i found to get round it was a new HDD

 

Obtained from another thread:

There are other ways of removing/resetting bios password and hdd password.
HDD password:
To reset the HDD password, run HDD_PW.EXE as follows:
1. Key in hdd_pw 15494 0
2. Press 2.
3. Select one upper-case string from the list.
4. Reboot system and key in the selected string (0KJFN42 or UVEIQ96) on the HDD User
Password screen.

BIOS password:
To reset the BIOS password, run BIOS_PW.EXE as follows:
1. Key in bios_pw 14452 0
2. Select one string from the list.
3. Reboot the system and key in the selected string (qjjg9vy, 07yqmjd etc.) for the BIOS user
password.

 

Obtained from another thread:

There are other ways of removing/resetting bios password and hdd password.
HDD password:
To reset the HDD password, run HDD_PW.EXE as follows:
1. Key in hdd_pw 15494 0
2. Press 2.
3. Select one upper-case string from the list.
4. Reboot system and key in the selected string (0KJFN42 or UVEIQ96) on the HDD User
Password screen.

BIOS password:
To reset the BIOS password, run BIOS_PW.EXE as follows:
1. Key in bios_pw 14452 0
2. Select one string from the list.
3. Reboot the system and key in the selected string (qjjg9vy, 07yqmjd etc.) for the BIOS user
password.

 

I dont know too much about password security, but if the above is all you have to do to unlock a computer, then why bother with having passwords in the first place?