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    Lenovo Y580 unable to remove HDD password

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by iJohnW, Oct 31, 2012.

  1. iJohnW

    iJohnW Newbie

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    When I first got my Lenovo Y580 I set a HDD password. But I find it rather annoying than useful, so I would like to remove it. However the BIOS won't let me because the option to remove the HDD password is greyed out. I updated from 36 to 39 but didn't have any effect. It would be great if someone could help me out here.

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    iJohnW, Oct 31, 2012
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  2. mhp32

    mhp32 Notebook Consultant

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    did you try resetting your bios to default to see if the option appear again?
    Take the battery out and unplug. Press the power button for 30 seconds. Now boot back into the Bios with F2 repeat couple times.

    option 2:
    set a new master password and reboot to bios and see if this could unlock the greyed hhd password...

    try with UEFI off...

    last resort is to do a back up image of your drive somewhere then format your drive and reinstall your back up image to it.
     
    mhp32, Oct 31, 2012
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  3. iJohnW

    iJohnW Newbie

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    Thanks for the reply mhp32. I realise that it's been a few months since I asked this question, but I came here to share my solution (It wasn't until 2 days ago that I made some time to fix it).

    Resetting the BIOS doesn't work, neither does setting a new master password. So I tried the formatting option, which was a pain in the because the recovery disc which I used to restore the system image was spitting out errors after I used a USB stick with Windows to format the SSD. Eventually I restored my system image, but everything was the same as before, still with a password on the HDD. I tried to override the HDD password by setting administrator/user passwords and then clearing them, with as result an additional password on each drive, the SSD required 2 passwords and the HDD one password.

    My final solution: I secure erased both the SSD and HDD, the SSD already had a system image so I only had to copy the data from the HDD to an external drive. I did the secure erase with Parted Magic, here is a proper guide: How to securely erase an SSD drive | How To - CNET

    It took about 10 seconds for my SSD and 3 hours for a 750GB HDD. After secure erasing both disks I started the Windows recovery program from a USB stick and restored the system image (If it produces a parameter error, just pull the USB stick out before you click 'finish').
     
    iJohnW, Jul 29, 2013
    #3