Question : Problem: Seagate Security Freeze Lock

A teacher brought a laptop to me today which cuts out after completing the POST and BIOS stages of boot up, and sits at a blank screen.

As it is a Seagate drive, I ran Seagate SeaTools on the laptop in question and it showed up that the drive is "Security Freeze Locked". All other HDD tests including a S.M.A.R.T test came back as clear so the HDD itself is not faulty.

I've looked in the BIOS and a HDD password is not set, but a supervisor password is, purely to prevent students and teachers gaining access to the BIOS.

Is there any way that this lock can be removed so the HDD is accessible again? I believe that a program such as Active KillDisk can work it's way around the lock but want to avoid having to rebuild the laptop if possible, and also, there's no guarantee that Active KillDisk wont remove everything only for the lock to still be in place.

Thanks

B

Answer : Problem: Seagate Security Freeze Lock

Found this article where a seagate employee says it's not an error condition.

So the reason it's not booting may be related to a corrupted MBR or something like that.

http://stx.lithium.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&message.id=117

If you care about the data on this drive, image it to another disk with linux using ddrescue
If you need data recovery software, http://www.runtime.org for $99 has good partition recovery software for you. (Easiest to use, best results for under $400.00)