Having never used a password on a hard drive, I'm afraid I'm unfamiliar with the process.  I would think if the password was on the system disk you would be presented with an opportunity to enter the password at boot time.  Given that the disk is presently supposed to be blank, I suspect you would need to go to System Setup and explore the menus to see if you find a place there to enter a password.  Since the password is on the drive, it must be in System Setup as the problem is encountered before an operating system has a chance to load.

With regard to the passworded hard drive, you will need to contact Dell and see if they will provide you a password that will unlock the drive or replace it with a hard drive that doesn't have the password.

If you made the restore disks as Dell recommended when you received your computer you should be able to restore your system to the new disks once the password issue has been resolved.  You will need to go through the CTRL i procedure as you have discovered to set up the RAID volume before attempting the restore process.

Thanks. Do you know how I actually get to the prompt to type the password? I don't see that at all, either with Control I or after a reboot.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'll be interested in the resolution as well.  I have a couple of those machines and if it is necessary to avoid a certain type of hard drive it would be nice to know.

Good luck!

EDIT:  The more I think on this, the more strange it seems.  I know you can't get into the CTRL i page due to the machine believing the disks to be locked, but have you gone to the SATA operation item to see if changing the status from RAID On to RAID Autodetect/AHCI helps?

@Tesla: I've actually swapped back and forth between each of the four Western Digital drives Dell sent me; in each case, every drive causes a "drive is locked" error. My older Seagates did not generate this particular problem. I don't think the drives they shipped me are damaged, although the possibility exists (by Dell Support's own admission) that the refurbishment testing may have done something to the firmware. In any event, it sounds like Tesla's explanation above is likely to be the correct one.

Western Digital started doing something (very stupid) lately where they produce a "Desktop Edition" and a "RAID Edition" (that is the terms they use to market them). You most likely have a pair of Desktop Edition hard drives that can't run in a RAID without it being enabled in the firmware chip on the drives directly - ergo the password.

No other HDD manufacturer does this & WD uses it as a way to target 'vertical markets' - meaning they can charge extra for the drives. Ask Dell for Seagate HDDs; I've always had better reliability & they don't have nonsense issues like this.

Woops...I meant GREG.J's suggested answer. Sorry, everyone.

One of the new drives might be bad (or damaged in shipping). Try each individually, and test and diag heavily before assuming its good.

Then, since they are only Blue series drives (and not really rated for RAID setups) you might be having a TLER issue.

Since you are running RAID-0, I assume you are looking for speed. The easiest (and higher performance) solution would be to boot from a small SSD, and use the spinning drives for Programs and Data.

This sounds like the answer...I'll research this a bit further (if you have any links, I'll be glad to pass them along to Dell Support. I do have Seagate Drives on their way now.  Thanks!

I forget the exact article I saw but the 2009 & later WD drives have their TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) disabled in the firmware. I found a tom's hardware article that has one user asking about it & a WD forum that briefly glazes over it too. But anything firm on WD's website has been taken down, all Google search results I find are set to a WD "page no longer exists." Maybe WD realized it was a bad idea & stopped manufacturing drives like that.

WDC is only 1 vendor.  Several others have RAID class vs Regular drives.

SAMSUNG F1R RAID-Class HE753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive

Seagate 

NL35 Series SATA

Nearline RAID-ready 500GB, 400GB and 250GB SATA* disc drives

IBM offers enterprise SAS and SATA, and self-encrypting (SED) hard disk drives. Industry leading RAID and SED solutions increase data reliability, performance and security.

OK, here's the latest update on my RAID 0 problem: The tech came out with appartently identical Seagate Barracuda drives and a new motherboard. He installed all of these, and the "drives are locked" error has not changed. Again, this does not happen with my older Seagate drives.

We examined the firmware version on my older drives, and sure enough, it's older: v. CC45. So it appears there's simply an incompatibility between newer drives and Dell's older motheboard/RAID controller firmware.

I downloaded Seagate's tools ("SeaTools") and ran diagnostics on the disks. SeaTools could find no hardware errors. But the System Log continues to report that the C drive is "corrupt and unusable."

It seems that I should interpret the problem as a logical file structure error, not a physical problem. Unless Dell has a different recommendation (like an upgraded motherboard), I'll likely reformat the drives and reload my image to them. Maybe that will clear the remaining error. But I'm going to continue to worry about what will happen if I'm forced some day to replace a drive: I hate the idea of downgrading to a single disk instead of RAID 0. But I'm willing to listen to suggestions.

Carl

Label drives #1 and #2 .

Install (or only connect) 1 drive

Be sure the BIOS detects it, RAID is OFF, AHCI mode

Boot Windows DVD and start to install

Delete all partitions and create on whole disk partition

Install Windows real quick

After Windows loads the first time, install ChipSet drivers

Install video drivers. That should be fine for a basic install for testing.

- Test operation and document results.

Boot with Seagate SeaTools CD and do a confidence test.

- Document results

Do this for both drives and test them.

Are you saying I should run these tests on my old drives? I have done that, although I did it while running SeaTools from the drives themselves (they passed).