Question Dell bricked my HD with the bios wipe function

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Jan 2, 2021
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Hi.

I have a dell precision 3620 that i pulled out of the garbage somewhere. It is working fine, but I wanted a fresh experience. So I reset the bios and clicked the "wipe internal disks on reboot" function. It started up, and the progress bar moved along. But after about a minute or so, it stopped, with an error. When I restarted the computer, it asked for the disk password.

The disk is a 500GB Seagate Barracuda.

As I understand the sata secure erase function, it first sets a password on the disk, and then tries to overwrite the data on the disk. I guess the Dell software generate a password for the erase function, that it is supposed to remove after the wipe. But because it did not finish the wipe, it forgot to remove the password.

I used another disk for the computer, and its working fine. But I'm sort of disappointed that this software failed so badly. It could have been a 12TB disk. I get the motivation for password locking the drive while wiping. But I should at least have been presented with the password. So that I could write it down, and use it in case of a power outage or something. I can't phone dell, cause I did not buy it from them.

Does anybody know of a way to factory reset these drives, or wipe the passwords? I don't care about the contents on the disk. Is there a way to start the wipe function with a new password? I guess that would be a security breach...
 
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