Re: How to perform SECURITY ERASE on a SEC4 (security enabled/locked) PATA drive ?

[Maciej Grela <maciej.grela@gmail.com>]

2011/5/3 Mark Lord <kernel@teksavvy.com>:
> On 11-04-30 04:10 AM, Maciej Grela wrote:
>> 2011/4/30 Mark Lord <kernel@teksavvy.com>:
>>>
>>> Okay.  Now please do exactly this (and I mean EXACTLY):
>>>
>>> 1. shut down and completely power off the system.
>>> 2. boot up again, and immediately do "hdparm --Istdout /dev/sdb
>>> and post the results here.
>>>
>>> I want to see what the default security state of the drive is,
>>> and that sequence above will tell all.
>>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Here is the data:
> ..
>
>> Security:
>>         Master password revision code = 65534
>>                 supported
>>                 enabled
>>                 locked
>>         not     frozen
>>         not     expired: security count
>>         not     supported: enhanced erase
>>         Security level high
>>         42min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT.
> ..
>
> Okay, your drive already has a password set on it.
> So to do a --security-erase, you will likely need to
> know and supply that exact password on the command line:
>
>    hdparm --security-erase XXXXXXXX /dev/sdb
>
> If you don't know the password, then you can try this:
>
>    hdparm --security-set-pass NULL --user-master m /dev/sdb
>    hdparm --security-erase    NULL --user-master m /dev/sdb
>
> If that also fails, then you'll have to read through the ATA
> security feature documentation (from the t13 standards),
> and try and understand how the quirky state machine model
> for it is supposed to work.  And then puzzle it out from there.
>

Hi,

Thanks for all the info, I already did try that approach after
studying the t13 document. I tried to invoke all the state transitions
from SEC4 mentioned there without any progress. So I'll take a break
from trying to solve this problem as it's not very urgent.

Best regards,
Maciej Grela