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1. The screen stays black and an erasure process starts in the background: the drive’s light starts
   blinking as the drive is being actively erased. In this situation, only the screen is missing, if the user wants to monitor the erasure a workaround consists in monitoring it via the Blancco Management Console. After the erasure, the report can also be fetched. Please refer to the Drive Eraser Configuration Tool and the Blancco Management Console user manuals for more information about this feature.
   
   
2. The screen stays black and nothing starts in the background, however the machine is on (lights are on, fans are working). Only the screen is missing but the drives are most likely detected and ready for erasure, if the user wants to start and monitor the erasure a workaround consists in controlling it via the Blancco Management Console. After the erasure, the report can also be fetched from the Blancco Management Console. Please refer to the Drive Eraser Configuration Tool and the Blancco Management Console user manuals for more information about this feature.
   
   
3. The screen stays black and the machine is unresponsive (lights are off, fans are not working). In this situation, the Freeze lock removal is most likely paused or has failed. There are a few ways to proceed:
   
   
   1. With some old machines, the Freeze lock removal process may be paused because the machine has not had enough time to restart. Try to press any keyboard key (e.g. Enter) or push the machine’s power button for 1 second or so to wake up the machine and restart the software's user interface / begin the erasure (after this, you may end up with a working screen or in the case 1 or 2).
      
      
   2. Some laptops and tablets require to be connected to (or disconnected from) their docking station to allow the power cycling to succeed. Other manipulations may involve connecting/disconnecting the power cable during the power cycling process.
      
      
   3. On other machines, power cycling is a functionality that needs to be turned on. Check from the BIOS/UEFI settings that the machine can be suspended and restarted, the setting may correspond to:
      1. Enabling the "Suspend-to-RAM" or "S3 mode" functionality.
      2. Moving the "ACPI Standby State" to "S3".
      3. Unblocking the "Sleep" or "S3 State" functionality.
         
         
   4. The BIOS on some machines may not support the S3 sleep state. In that case, try upgrading/downgrading the BIOS version to enable S3 support. A few examples below:
      1. In case of the Microsoft Surface 3 Tablet older BIOS versions (e.g. 1.50410.218) does not allow the erasure to proceed, nevertheless newer BIOS versions (e.g. 1.51116.78) allow the FLR procedure to work and the drive to be securely erased without a glitch.
      2. In case of the Lenovo X1 Tablet (model 20GHS0S100) the BIOS versions 1.55 or lower do support the S3 sleep state, nevertheless the BIOS versions 1.57 and higher no longer support the S3 sleep state. If you need to remove the freeze locks on such machines, try to downgrade to the BIOS 1.55 or lower.
         
         
   5. If the previous does not work, the Freeze lock removal process has likely failed. Next, try to remove the drive from the machine and connect it to a motherboard that doesn’t enforce any Freeze lock (as the Freeze lock itself is an entirely BIOS dependent feature) or that can be suspended and restarted properly.
      
      
   6. Otherwise, unplug either the signal or power cable of the drive. This requires that the following steps are performed:
      
      1. Shut down the computer system.
      2. Unplug the signal cable or four-wire power cable of the drive while leaving the signal cable plugged in. To eliminate the danger of Electro Static Discharge, always ground yourself when removing the power cord. The signal cable is the preferred option and should be attempted first. If the freeze lock remains after attempting the boot with signal cable removed, attempt the boot with the power cord removed. This method is not recommended by Blancco, as the drive may result damaged in the process.
      3. Power on the system and boot the Blancco software.
      4. When the software is loading i.e. you see the progress bar, plug the signal/power cord of the drive back in.

Other problematic hardware:

Some machines may not show any "black screen", they will seemingly restart and the user will be able to access the UI. Nevertheless, some erasure standards requiring firmware-based erasure commands (e.g. "Blancco SSD Erasure", "NIST 800-88 Purge", "Cryptographic Erasure", "BSI-GS/E" or "BSI-2011-VS" to name a few) will consistently fail with error messages similar to "SECURE ERASE command failed", "BLOCK ERASE EXT command failed", etc. These machines do not support the FLR procedure. A good example of them is the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 machine. In order to handle them, please refer to the previous chapter, especially the alternatives described in 3c, 3d, 3e and 3f.

Some cases when the Freeze Lock Removal is not mandatory:

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