Hi,
It is not anyones fault that the password was not reset before a secure erase is done to repurpose the drive. That happens most of the time really...
The problem is that the drive could not be reused again once the ATA password was lost. The disk becomes scrap metal. But far worse is that the drive still contains active data that could be possibly retrieved if the password were later remembered or recovered.
In our case, we have users with machines with only one password set that only they know. If the data is deleted that is bad, but as long as it is not lost publically it does not matter much. So they forget the password, as they often do, and they realize the data is gone but want the machine re-loaded with the generic OS to be ready to go like a new system. With normal hardware encrypting drives, that is trivial and takes about 30 seconds to reset the drive with secure erase and then another 30 minutes to reload the OS and they are good to go.
There is no reason at all for the hard drive to "brick" or be destroyed in the case of a lost ATA password. Why do they do that? A secure erase to restore the drive is no less safe than the firmware locking it up. In fact, it is far less safe if the drive does lock! Then the bricked drive would be scrapped with a possible known password. If you secure erase it, nobody knows the password at all. but by locking it, you have a fully loaded drive that has a possibly compromised password but you can't erase it!
Thus, the drive has active data on it protected buy a "lost" password. That is not an acceptable state to simply throw it away in. If the password ever does become known (someone finds the sticky note) then the data may be public. So the only option then to insure that the data is destroyed is to physically destroy the drive itself and send it off as electronic scrape. In this case, the original password was known but an unknown new value was apparently set. What was that new password?? Was it "9834ynvnkldf099c, 3j30j53ct1c" or was it "Intel Secret Backdoor..." With out knowing exactly what happened and the state of the new password, the drive is assumed to have live data that can possibly be recovered.
So the only way to insure that data on a drive with a lost password is destroyed is to physically destroy the drive. Since you can't secure erase it without the password, or the password being removed (worse), the only sure way to destroy the data is with a hammer.
If Intel support would have a solution to find the password that would be very very bad now wouldn't it. Then the encryption is worthless. If you could secure erase it for sure and reuse it then that would be fine and that is what normal manufacturers do. So in my case, the drives are not anything I want anyway and I can assure you that Intel cannot fix what was left of that drive 
I suppose it would be interesting to see what they said. Maybe they would send me a new one. The only way I could send the old one back though in that case is fully destroyed physically.
So that is what I know and why I did what I did. I came here originally just to find out how to secure erase the drive. I was obviously disappointed to find that the drive hardware was actually rendered less than worthless and had to be physically destroyed.
