I went into my BIOS and wanted to play with some security functions. I added a password for system boot, master password, and user password. All having identical passwords. I save and restart, then pops up the system password prompt. I enter and bypass, then comes another prompt which was weird to me. I enter the same password since I only entered one password. No access. What's locked is my harddrive. This is a laptop by the way.
I tried typing in different combinations (just in case I fat fingered) but no luck. I spent a lot of time on it even though after two failed attempts, you have to restart. I removed the hard drive and made it into an external drive and tried to see if I could reformat the drive but it is in a state where it's not accessible (I believe due to the password). I've tried through linux (gparted and parted) and windows tools (disk manager, chkdsk, and others can't remember right now) but they all give me an input/output error--not able to read the drive. Something to note is that the computer recognizes the drive but doesn't display the partitions. It just says it's unallocated and not initilized. I cannot partition the drive, nor can I initialize it because it cannot access it. I tried booting my computer from a fresh USB win10 install to see if I could format the drive that way but I kept getting the error that I could not install windows via USB. Something to point out is that every other computer will recognize the harddrive externally but the main laptop I pulled it from will not recognize it as an external drive (not in boot menu and it just stays on the lenovo boot screen FOREVER). I did try contacting Lenovo support to see what they could do over the phone but unfortunately the man said there was nothing that could be done, possibly Microsoft could assist. I called to check if there was a default hard drive password or something. But no luck. If anyone wants the hard drive model, just let me know, I have to put it back in the laptop to figure that out, but I know it's WD. Thank you for your suggestions and help. If you have any more questions or requests, feel free to ask.
*PS - didn't upgrade anything. All components are default.
*PSS - I don't care about wiping the drive, I just want to be able to use it again.
*PSSS - If you are wondering if it's encrypted, I wouldn't be able to tell you. All I did was enter a password before this issue occurred..
I tried typing in different combinations (just in case I fat fingered) but no luck. I spent a lot of time on it even though after two failed attempts, you have to restart. I removed the hard drive and made it into an external drive and tried to see if I could reformat the drive but it is in a state where it's not accessible (I believe due to the password). I've tried through linux (gparted and parted) and windows tools (disk manager, chkdsk, and others can't remember right now) but they all give me an input/output error--not able to read the drive. Something to note is that the computer recognizes the drive but doesn't display the partitions. It just says it's unallocated and not initilized. I cannot partition the drive, nor can I initialize it because it cannot access it. I tried booting my computer from a fresh USB win10 install to see if I could format the drive that way but I kept getting the error that I could not install windows via USB. Something to point out is that every other computer will recognize the harddrive externally but the main laptop I pulled it from will not recognize it as an external drive (not in boot menu and it just stays on the lenovo boot screen FOREVER). I did try contacting Lenovo support to see what they could do over the phone but unfortunately the man said there was nothing that could be done, possibly Microsoft could assist. I called to check if there was a default hard drive password or something. But no luck. If anyone wants the hard drive model, just let me know, I have to put it back in the laptop to figure that out, but I know it's WD. Thank you for your suggestions and help. If you have any more questions or requests, feel free to ask.
*PS - didn't upgrade anything. All components are default.
*PSS - I don't care about wiping the drive, I just want to be able to use it again.
*PSSS - If you are wondering if it's encrypted, I wouldn't be able to tell you. All I did was enter a password before this issue occurred..
Facebook
Twitter