Lenovo Y50-70 Hard Drive Locked After BIOS change

simonhawk

Prominent
Dec 10, 2017
3
0
510
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..
 

bignastyid

Splendid
Moderator
My guess would be a typo was made when setting the password. Unfortunately forum rules prohibit assisting with bypassing security, but being a HDD password there isn't much you can do anyway except for trying to guess the typo and hope you find it.
 
If you didn't actually set a HDD password, trying entering a blank at the password prompt (just hit enter at the prompt). It's possible a setting you changed activated the HDD password, but if there's no password yet set, a blank should let you in. You could also try removing and turning off all the passwords you set.

HDD passwords are designed to prevent data on the drive from being accessed if the drive is stolen (e.g. if there's sensitive corporate data on it). Since a common tactic for bypassing OS security is to simply pop the drive out and hook it up to another computer, HDD passwords were developed to thwart that. So yeah, connecting the drive to another computer isn't going to help. If it truly is protected by an unknown password, maybe the NSA or CIA knows a way to crack it, but for the rest of us the drive is as good as junk.
 

simonhawk

Prominent
Dec 10, 2017
3
0
510


Thought I replied to this. I immediately considered these options and already carried them out. Failed. I did enter the bios disabled the passwords but still no luck. Also, I popped the cmos but I don't believe it reset anything but there was still a system password.

FYI, I took it to a local tech store and they were also unable to fix it. :/