Hack through a harddrive password

I received a laptop at work that was brought in to be fixed. It had been brought to GeekSquad and deemed unfixable. They couldn't do shit.

I need to hack past a harddrive password. Bruteforce in DOS? Is that even possible? The other option is to manual program ATA commands, which I do NOT know how to do.

Any ideas?

The drive is pretty much hardlocked with 128bit encryption. I've called Gateway support as a last resort before I get started on this shit, and they have no master password for the drive, as most harddrives should.

I'm going to be attempting a direct ATA hack by sending ATA commands directly to the drive, that's about the only thing I can think of that might work.

I've tried nearly everything I can, aside from punching the kid in the face because he won't tell his parents wtf he set the password to in BIOS, and won't own up to this crap that's taken me 5 hours and 3 4.7gb dvds with maybe 100mb used on each one, FFFFFFFFFF.

sorry, had to rage.