Mystereous hard drive problems

An SSD mind tickler for the forum…

You may have seen my other SSD post, about adding enterprise gear to a game console to get high quality video for movie streaming.

I have another enterprise SSD related mystery someone here may know how to resolve, if it can be resolved at all.

The story of Intel DC S3xxx backup drives:
I purchased several Intel DC series drives back in 2014, to serve as backups. One, a 3500 I added to my PS3 for reasons discussed in other posts.

A second, a 3700 drive, I purchased as a one off. It’s the only DC drive > 120GB that was purchased for extreme emergencies. A big investment, at the time, but for my purposes one of these is enough in case of a severe RAID or software defined storage failure.

I unboxed this 3700 drive back in 2015, installed it in an old laptop I had laying around (an ASUS N61vn), Installed Windows 8.1 on it, moved a few files off and on to it to be sure all the rates matched up, and left the drive in the laptop for years until a few days ago.

Later, I removed the drive from the machine, connected it via USB using a portable enclosure, in order to prepare to format it for use as a backup. To my consternation, the drive is seen by the OS but for some reason cannot be written to. The error codes are not codes, the response from the Apple machine’s Disk Utility used to make the initial attempt to communicate with it is not interpret-able. So, I start getting on calls with Intel. We diagnose it using Intel SSD utility and the command line returns 'locked with ATA security". Intel does everything it can to wash it’s hands of the situation, alleging the ASUS motherboard manufacturer locked the drive by default, using this old school standard.

Later, I speak with ASUS, and they say their boards do not lock drives. However, if drives become locked by locking BIOS then you can unlock the drive through the BIOS utility. The drive does not respond to the BIOS in the original ASUS laptop, as though the board in the machine has been changed and, if responsible for locking the drive, is out of step with the original lock.

The drive is new. Two other machines say that the drive is locked (how it became locked is unclear since I made no effort to lock it), one machine says the drive is “bad”. There are so many capabilities in these DC drives (which you can see by running Intels optimization utility on other non locked drives). I am almost 100% sure the drive is perfectly fine, but the laptop has locked it somehow and there was no documentation that came with the laptop that said this would occur with any drive used in the machine. With the ASUS laptop and the drive out of lock step, there is no obvious path forward. Neither ASUS or Intel will take responsibility for the mechanisms surreptitiously applied to the drive or provide a supported method of reversing them, assuming it is not a bad drive. I find it impossible that it could be bad, because the 3700 level drive is rated for 10 complete re-writes per day for 5 years and has essentially not been used for more than 30 minutes.

Has anyone come across this issue before? I’m pretty upset that these features (permanently locking out drives) are present in the hardware and there is no documentation or notification on them that states the drives exposed to them will be unable to reformat or be used again. This seems unbelievable to me, and I’d like to know if anyone else has experienced this.

So is it this issue ?

What to Do if Your Intel® SSD Detects a Security Freeze Lock

I found an Intel doc on how to fix this via a google search.

It seems to be related to Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 but not Windows 7

It might be, I could be doing it wrong, lol.

I’m really curious if anyone is familiar with the old ATA security standard. What I’ve found on it seems to imply there are a few different implementations. Some allow you to reformat, no problems. Others never let you proceed without the pass-code challenge being met by the motherboard that applied it.

It’s silly, because you can full on encrypt a drive using a modern TPM and still reformat it later as long as you don’t care what data is on it.

On the other hand, this older standard, so far, seems invincible without trying one of several things I’ve found that aren’t explicitly supported and are very capable of bricking the drive.

Since the standard is so old, I’m sorta curious if anyone has fought this battle before or if there’s an ATA command protocol veteran that might know a smarter way of diagnosing this from an engineer’s perspective. I’m not really all that confident, among the procedures I’ve found, in selecting precisely the correct option that doesn’t result in permanent loss. It’s tricky because of the whole, some fix’s break it forever issue, lol.

Here is the rest of the text from that article:

If a Security Freeze Lock is detected on the drive, the UEFI/BIOS recognized the Intel® Solid State Drive (Intel® SSD) as plugged in when you started the system.

To remove the Security Freeze Lock state and continue with the Secure Erase process:

  1. Remove the SATA power cable from the drive and quickly reconnect it while the Intel® SSD Toolbox is running. Do this quickly so that the system recognizes the Intel SSD. Depending on your system configuration, you may need to remove the Intel SSD from the system.
  2. Unplug and plug in the SSD. Click OK . The Intel SSD Toolbox rescans the system for the Intel SSD.
  3. Once the drive is detected, continue with the Secure Erase. If the Security warning message displays again, repeat the power-cycling process. Quickly remove and reconnect the SATA power cable.

If the Intel SSD is not detected:

  1. Click OK on the Selected Drive Not Found message. The Intel SSD Toolbox home screen displays and scans the system.
  2. When it detects the Intel SSD, it displays on the Intel SSD Toolbox home screen. Click the Intel SSD and then click Secure Erase .

If the Intel SSD doesn’t display on the Intel SSD Toolbox home screen:

  1. Click Start , right-click Computer , and click Manage .
  2. Click OK when you see the User Account Control message.
  3. Click Device Manager , right-click Disk drives , and click Scan for hardware changes .
  4. After scanning the system, go to the Intel SSD Toolbox home screen. Click Refresh .
  5. Try the Secure Erase procedure again.

If you still see the Security Freeze Lock message, we recommend running Secure Erase from a drive utility with Secure Erase.

For more information on running Secure Erase, see the Intel® SSD Toolbox help files.

Yea, I went through this with Intel, on the phone. The support personnel was working for a 3rd party company, so it wasn’t really “Intel”, per se. Right now I’m in blame game territory, ASUS is saying it’s Intel’s problem, Intel is saying it’s ASUS’s problem, lol.

Have you tried connecting it to the Asus laptop via USB
Have you tried installing in via sata on a desktop
It could be the USB adapter that caused it to lock?

I’ve read that too. Intel said you have to connect it directly to a motherboard to run any low level operations on it at all.

I think I’m going to have to wait till ASUS comes back and provides a response. At this point, anything I try to force will take it out of the state the laptop placed it in and could cause a world of pain.

I’m beginning to miss my old disk drive firmware engineer friend, for more than his wit… hehe

Perhaps there is a bypass by connecting a certain set of pins


Like those to the right of the data connector
I think I remember some drives often used those for configuration

Ooh yea, I remember those from the old days!

These drives don’t seem to have those :-/

Well good luck in finding a solution :slight_smile:

Thanks, I’ll try the things folks suggest(ed) once get back with ASUS and let you know what works, or if nothing works, hehe :slight_smile:

It does look like the drive is locked for secure erase.

I’d suggest using a machine with all other drives (including OS) removed, and just a live USB and the Intel ssd in.

I would strongly recommend getting a USB stick with a live Linux, and downloading the HDPARM application from the distro ‘s repo’s (doesn;t matter the distro, use any you feel comfortable with, most distro’s should have the utility in the package manager, but I would suggest Ubuntu, as there are more searchable results, and the live usb is relatively stable)

Then with the SSD plugged directly int the sata socket of a machine, you should be able to diagnose. (It will fail over USB, possibly permenantly, see linded site added at bottom of post)

Part of the secure erase cycle is to lock the drive for safety, then erase, then unlock.
If there is a system issue, and it does not fully complete, it remains I. Locked state, to avoid data compromise.
We need to find the right password to unlock the drive.
Now, some programs have their own internal password that they use in the mean time while erasing the drive, so it is worth trying various ones to remove the lock.

So now to find out what started the secure erase…

It was a couple of years ago, but as far as you remember, it was last used by your laptop?

I would search for default secure erase password asus and Mac/OS X or Windows, depending on the app that might have locked it.

The drive can take 2 passwords, and I can’t remember if the utility sets the User password, (I think it does) or the master one.

The reason I suggested Linux live usb, is because if Windows might not make the drive available to the Intel ssd utility, so it might not even detect it, and even when it does, it might not unlock it is a way that the utility can help

The secure erase info page in page for linux is here:
https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase

[edit, changed now from: I’m on mobile, and will rearrange words when back on desktop, and link to wikipage]

Following from this guide:
https://tinyapps.org/docs/wipe_drives_hdparm.html

4. If drive is locked, unlock & disable security

Upon completion of step 3, security should automatically switch back to disabled. If not, you will need to disable it manually. However, note that in such a case, Secure Erase likely did not complete successfully, leaving the drive only partially wiped. This can be caused by the 2 hour timeout in versions prior to 9.31, for example.

# hdparm -I /dev/sdx … Security: Master password revision code = 65534 supported enabled locked not frozen not expired: security count supported: enhanced erase Security level high 98min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 98min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT. …

Let’s unlock it:

# hdparm --user-master u --security-unlock p /dev/sdx security_password=“p” /dev/sdx: Issuing SECURITY_UNLOCK command, password=“p”, user=user

and disable security:

# hdparm --user-master u --security-disable p /dev/sdx security_password=“p” /dev/sdx: Issuing SECURITY_DISABLE command, password=“p”, user=user

Now we’re good:

# hdparm -I /dev/sdx … Security: Master password revision code = 65534 supported not enabled not locked not frozen …

“Just buy a new one” is not really helpful if OP want’s to revive the old drive.

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And when the drive in question is a not-so cheap enterprise one…

But flash is much less expensive than it used to be

“cheap” is a relative term. What is cheap for one person can be very expensive for another. If you have excess funds, I can give you a paypal account and I will gladly accept donations to a beer fund. :wink:

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Do you mean “Just like Beer, Flash is only cheap in amateur quantities?”

Or like “kids have to club together for their first flash array, but grown ups can just pick one up from the store on the way home…”

Yea, I have this one business class drive that was $500 new, and it got locked by an old laptop’s firmware. Otherwise, it’s brand new. I’m so upset about it; I’m determined to unlock it someday when I can get the time to work through the steps and be sure those steps won’t brick the drive.

I can totally feel your pain when it comes to these things, lol.