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July 20th, 2020 08:00
Unable to unlock SSD after BIOS upgrade
Hi.
I was using Inspiron 5566 BIOS version 1.10.0 and after the upgrade to 1.11.0 I was unable to unlock my HDD. Password was set using BIOS version 1.10.0. This happens because the input taken for the password, suppose "password123" is transformed into other sequence of bytes and then sent to the drive, causing this issue.
The drive is KINGSTON SA400S37240G
The bios won't allow me to downgrade and unlock my HDD since the newer version has security advisories!
Also hdparm is unable to unlock the drive, and for me reseting it is not a possibility!
I'm looking foward the following ideas for a solution:
1. force downgrade, anyway?
2. how the old bios calculated the password and use it to unlock with hdparm?
3. maybe Dell can make available a BIOS that calculate the password the old way?
ejn63
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July 20th, 2020 08:00
Assuming you have the existing password, just remove it from CMOS setup (go into setup, and change the password, leaving both fields completely blank. Save and exit.
If you can't blank the password in setup, there's something else wrong -- you'll need to contact Dell support for assistance by voice phone call.
jphughan
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July 20th, 2020 08:00
@laksd1 At least on some Dell systems, there's an "Allow BIOS Downgrade" option that you have to specifically enable in the BIOS setup. If you can't downgrade even after enabling that and ejn63's suggestion for simply removing the password doesn't work, I'm not sure what to suggest next other than contacting Dell Support. But going forward, I would really recommend that you consider using software encryption like BitLocker or VeraCrypt rather than an HDD password, even if your drive uses the HDD password for hardware encryption. First of all, for drives that do NOT support hardware encryption, the HDD password is not much security. Even for SSDs that do support it, some security researchers who actually looked at the implementation found severe security flaws in all of the SSDs they looked at. It was bad enough that Microsoft switched BitLocker from relying on hardware encryption by default if available to NOT allowing hardware encryption by default even if it was available. And second, using an HDD password makes it much harder or even impossible to recover data from that drive from another system if ever required. I remember a friend of mine had an HDD password that he set up while his SSD was in his Latitude E7440. When his system died, I installed that SSD into my XPS 15 9530 to try to recover data. I got the HDD password prompt, but the password wasn't accepted even though it was correct. I ended up having to borrow a different friend's E7440 and install it there in order for that password to be accepted, which allowed me to make an image backup. And an HDD password makes it impossible to recover data using a USB adapter/enclosure.
All of the issues above are avoided if you use software encryption, and software encryption imposes no meaningful performance penalty on modern CPUs that have hardware acceleration for AES encryption/decryption, even when using NVMe SSDs.