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I have a SSD drive extracted from a crashed laptop which seems to be working, but it's got a Absolute Secure Disk sofware which asks for password when I try to boot from the drive or denies any access when plugging through USB interface.

Now I don't want any data from this disk or so, I just though that it is possible to make it usable. Read here and there about safe erase but so far I failed in doing so, is it anyhow possible with this software? Mhdd fails to secure erase the drive.

Maybe someone could point me into right direction or clearly state that this drive is a brick and I can hang it on the wall.

It's not a duplicate. That question is about restoring the data, my intention is to reuse the disk losing the data thats already on it. I do not want to recover the existing data at any means.

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  • Possible duplicate of ATA security erase on SSD
    – dark_st3alth
    Commented Feb 1, 2017 at 9:00
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    I'd say that Superuser or perhaps serverfault might be a better fit for your question as it's more about the operation of the software than it is about the security of the software...
    – Rory McCune
    Commented Feb 1, 2017 at 9:15
  • @Rory yes, that may be the best solution, we'll I contacted the software vendor as well, maybe they will provide any solution or hint.
    – Nexowski
    Commented Feb 1, 2017 at 9:31
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    can't you just format the drive if you want to use it and don't need the data?
    – dandavis
    Commented Feb 1, 2017 at 20:07
  • I've tried that but it doesn't allow to do a normal format, even by gparted on a linux live cd.
    – Nexowski
    Commented Feb 2, 2017 at 8:54

1 Answer 1

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(As Rory noted, this isn't strictly a password-cracking approach, so may be better suited to Superuser or Server Fault. But the question is relevant to not knowing the password, and the original data isn't generally accessible, which has information security implications that may make it worth answering here anyway.)

It sounds like the Absolute Secure solution may be setting a controller-level ATA password. With high-security configurations, drives locked in this way cannot be unlocked without the original password, and can only be re-wiped.

If you attach the drive directly to a system with a SATA or other direct cable (and not via USB), and then boot from your Linux live CD, you may be able to at least restore the drive to service, as follows.

First, check to see if the drive is in a frozen state:

hdparm -I /dev/sda | egrep -i frozen
        frozen

If so, you may have to tell the OS to sleep the system, and then wake it back up, to un-freeze the drive.

Next, issue the following to set a new password, and then erase the drive:

# Set a new password to prepare the drive for erasure.
hdparm --security-set-pass password --user-master m /dev/sdX

# Erase the drive.
hdparm --security-erase password --user-master m /dev/sdX
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