Question SATA SSD Bricked? Please help.

Oct 14, 2020
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This is my first post here, so hi!

I have this SATA 3.5" Samsung 860 EVO 250gig drive. I had it connected via USB->SATA adapter and was wiping it while writing zeros 'dd' in parted magic a couple years back. The drive was disconnected during this process and it became unusable. So like any normal person I just chucked it in a drawer, got a new drive, and left the 860 evo sitting until now. I am not concerned with data, just making it work again.

I am on a win10 machine currently and I can plug the drive in and windows will detect it, and it is showing up in the device manager. It shows up in disk manager as well, with a red badge indicating the drive is not initialized. When I go to initialize it, I receive an Access denied error.

I think the drive is locked, and I dont know how to correct this. If someone could please point me in the right direction that would be excellent!
 
Oct 14, 2020
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thanks for the input., much appreciated. I went ahead and installed the samsung magician software and the result is the same. The drive shows up and is unable to be initialized with an access denied error. Samsung Magician is telling me that the drive does not support any of the functions. Thanks anyways
 
I think the drive is locked, and I dont know how to correct this. If someone could please point me in the right direction that would be excellent!
Parted magic might be able to bring your SSD out of frozen state.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
thanks for the input., much appreciated. I went ahead and installed the samsung magician software and the result is the same. The drive shows up and is unable to be initialized with an access denied error. Samsung Magician is telling me that the drive does not support any of the functions. Thanks anyways
Magician will not work via a USB adapter. Has to be internally connected.
 
Oct 14, 2020
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Thanks for all the input and sorry for the delay in response.

Attached everything via sata. Bios prompts for password at boot. Drive is recognized, windows can format it. I can transfer files to and from it. The drive works,, but I cannot remove the password.

Samsung magician sees it and can run diagnostics, but when I try to psid reset, or encrypt the drive, or any of the other options in magician it is greyed out and says the drive doesn't support it . I should also mention that magician detected and upgraded the drive firmware successfully as well.

I can do everything listed above in parted magic also but cannot do a secure or enhanced erase because the drive is registering as frozen and I have been unable to unfreeze it..

I feel like if I can use the drive and it accepts the pw I feed it.. shouldnt I be able to remove the password?

Ugh
 
The BIOS is freezing the drive via the ATA Security Freeze Lock command . This is to protect your drive from malware which might otherwise install its own password. Once the drive is Security Freeze Lock-ed, it remains that way until it is power cycled. ISTM that you should be able to remove the password via your BIOS setup.
 
Oct 14, 2020
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I'll have to double check that but it wasn't obvious first time around. It might be a hidden option that will only become available when changing something else. You know how that goes. Will repost when if I have more.. thanks again.