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I just bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon (1st gen) via eBay with an unknown hard disk password (HDP) SSD. I can only enter the BIOS when the SSD is unplugged, otherwise this icon shows up after the Lenovo screen:

1 over cylinder next to a lock, with a dash on the far right

I haven't found much on the internet about a HDP (hard disk password). This is the only place I found the image at all: Joe in Australia's website. The only solution suggested there is to replace the entire SSD. As with the X1C1 it requires an adapter to plugin a new drive, which is shipped from Asia in 1-2 months. Also, such an adapter only works for a new mSata/m.2 SSD to be plugged into the notebook, not to plug in the locked SSD into another board.

I already setup a Unetbootin USB drive and read about hdparm, however this requires a hot-pluggable SSD. It seems that this notebook doesn't support this (no option for this, AHCI is enabled) as when plugging the SSD in a running Unetbnootin-USB-Ubuntu system, it isn't recognized (fdisk -l only shows the usb stick). Also changed the bootorder to boot from the USB first, but with the SSD in, the icon shows up again.

Is there a way to format the SSD?

I found this blogpost where with an password you could unlock the ssd within another pc.

I also checked some default master-passwords for the ssd (sandisk sd5sg2-256g-1052e) 'sandisk123', 'ssd123' and 'test' without any luck.

Laurel
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nonsensation
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2 Answers2

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Reset forgotten hard disk password

If you forget the user hard disk password, or both user and master hard disk passwords, Lenovo cannot reset your passwords or recover data from the hard disk drive. You must take your computer to a Lenovo Service Provider to have the hard disk drive replaced.

https://support.lenovo.com/nl/en/solutions/ht036206

There are services that may be able to remove passwords but AFAIK they require the computer to be shipped so that firmware can be re-flashed.

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This is Lenovos HDD encryption feature. It doesn't encrypt the contents of a disk, but it makes it so the drive controller will refuse to do anything unless you enter the password.

That means, it wont show up in most recovery tools. The data is still in cleartext on the disk, but it will refuse to talk to the computer before it gets its password.

Giacomo1968
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Kleysley
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