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A teacher brought a laptop to me today which cuts out after completing the POST and BIOS stages of boot up, and sits at a blank screen.<br />
<br />
As it is a Seagate drive, I ran Seagate SeaTools on the laptop in question and it showed up that the drive is &quot;Security Freeze Locked&quot;. All other HDD tests including a S.M.A.R.T test came back as clear so the HDD itself is not faulty.<br />
<br />
I've looked in the BIOS and a HDD password is not set, but a supervisor password is, purely to prevent students and teachers gaining access to the BIOS.<br />
<br />
Is there any way that this lock can be removed so the HDD is accessible again? I believe that a program such as Active KillDisk can work it's way around the lock but want to avoid having to rebuild the laptop if possible, and also, there's no guarantee that Active KillDisk wont remove everything only for the lock to still be in place.<br />
<br />
Thanks<br />
<br />
B
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A teacher brought a laptop to me today which cuts out after completing the POST and BIOS stages of boot up, and sits at a blank screen.

As it is a Seagate drive, I ran Seagate SeaTools on the laptop in question and it showed up that the drive is "Security Freeze Locked". All other HDD tests including a S.M.A.R.T test came back as clear so the HDD itself is not faulty.

I've looked in the BIOS and a HDD password is not set, but a supervisor password is, purely to prevent students and teachers gaining access to the BIOS.

Is there any way that this lock can be removed so the HDD is accessible again? I believe that a program such as Active KillDisk can work it's way around the lock but want to avoid having to rebuild the laptop if possible, and also, there's no guarantee that Active KillDisk wont remove everything only for the lock to still be in place.

Thanks

B

Seagate Security Freeze Lock

Storage devices include any device used for storing and retrieving digital information. Hard disk drives (HDDs) use one or more rigid ("hard") rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. The primary competing technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), but HDDs remain the dominant medium for secondary storage due to advantages in price per bit and per-device recording capacity. CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable) is a digital optical disc storage format that allows information to be stored outside the mechanical HDD.

Storage Hardware

Computer data storage, often called storage or memory, is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. In addition to local storage devices like CD and DVD readers, hard drives and flash drives, solid state drives can hold enormous amounts of data in a very small device. Cloud services and other new forms of remote storage also add to the capacity of devices and their ability to access more data without building additional data storage into a device.