On my gateway laptop, I have an all black screen

Hard drive passwords cannot be broken or gotten past. There are no special tricks unfortunately....most people that have an unknown hard drive password are forced to get a new drive and start over. If you know what the old BIOS password was, sometimes when people make a bios password they make the hard drive password the same. BIOS passwords and user account passwords can be reset......hard drives cannot. If you need the files from the hard drive....you might be able to access the files by removing the drive and using an IDE / SATA to USB adapter and connecting to a different computer.