Problem
After a failed attempt at erasing certain drives, the drive may may contain a password following an erasure when you try to boot it next, it may also become not visible within the Drive Eraser software because of this!
Cause
This issue usually occurs on drives that have DCO or HPA areas that need to be eraser or removed, the reason this issue occurs is because Drive Eraser needs to set a password on the drive in order to run firmware based erasure commands, if some errors occur during this phase it is possible that the software leaves the drive locked. With the normal process the password will be removed later on. Typically we use the password "blancco" if the software needs to set the password to the drive. If the password stays on the drive after the failed erasure due to some error, rebooting the software should unlock the drive again and remove the password.
Resolution
The fact that even though the software locks the disk with the password "blancco", in some instances the password may not work when typed into the prompt asking for the disk password even though the correct password has been entered
Solution for this is to:
- Try bypassing the password-dialog by pressing ESC or typing password wrong multiple times
=> booting will continue (disk stays locked, but that's OK)
- Boot Blancco
=> Blancco will detect that the disk is password locked and will try to open it with "blancco"-password
=> Here the password works OK and the disk password is removed
With machines that won't allow you to continue booting with disk locked, there are two options:
- Connect the disk to machine "on-the-fly" after the BIOS goes past the disk detection, but before booting Blancco Drive Eraser
- Take the disk to another machine which allows booting to continue with a locked disk"
If the issue persists please contact our technical support team on the support.blancco.com website