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The Freeze Lock Removal (FLR) is a procedure that Blancco Drive Eraser / Blancco 5 attempts in order to remove special locks that have become popular on ATA HDD and SSD drives (a.k.a. "freeze locks"). These locks prevent some low level commands (firmware-based erasure commands) from being executed successfully and can cause the erasure to fail. Such firmware commands are used in some erasure standards (e.g. "Blancco SSD Erasure", "NIST 800-88 Purge", "Cryptographic Erasure", "BSI-GS/E" or "BSI-2011-VS" to name a few), they are also required with some erasure options (e.g. selecting the option "Erase Remapped Sectors" on a drive that has remapped sectors): if your process mandates using one of these erasure standards or erasure options or has to achieve a ‘Purge’ level erasure as defined by NIST *, the success of your erasure process will depend on the outcome of the FLR procedure.
The FLR procedure will attempt removing the freeze locks by power cycling the machine: the screen turns black for few seconds before returning. Depending on booting option used to boot Blancco Drive Eraser / Blancco 5 (see the "Booting Options" chapter from the Blancco Drive Eraser user manual) or the configured erasure process ("Manual", "Semi-automatic" or "Automatic", see the "Processes" chapter from the Blancco Drive Eraser user manual), the Freeze lock removal may occur at boot time (before the GUI is displayed) or right after pressing the "Erase" button. Unfortunately, in some hardware configurations the screen might not turn back on leaving the machine in a seemingly inoperable state (a.k.a. "black screen" issues), meaning that the FLR procedure is not properly supported by the machine. You will find below some ways to remediate such issues.
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Although Blancco Drive Eraser / Blancco 5 attempts to remove automatically the drives' freeze locks whenever detected, the user is given the possibility to prevent this mechanism from being triggered, as described in this article.
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