I’m trying to test and erase some WD drives so I can verify they are healthy enough to reinstall the OS on some servers. The drives are various WD Gold Enterprise Storage and WD Red NASware units.
I’ve been using WD drives for years and I’ve previously used Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for doing this, but I noticed that it has been deprecated, so I downloaded the new Dashboard application. It looks a lot more modern, but it seems to be a step backward in capability.
The problem I’m having is when I connect the drives to dashboard, it says “Security Frozen” and it won’t let me erase the drives. I also noticed that the feature for upgrading firmware is not there, presumably also because of the “Security Frozen” state. When I mouse-over the question mark, it says:
“Security displays the security state of the device. In order to control the security state of the device, use software like Windows BitLocker or your system BIOS.”
I searched on the internet and found quite a few case of this situation but no explanation of how to clear it. I have worked on a lot of computers over the years and I can’t recall a single computer that supported erasing a drive from within the BIOS.
The server did not have BitLocker enabled and the drives were not encrypted or password protected. There is no support for such a thing in the BIOS, so there is no reason why they should be in a “Frozen” state.
Since I could not use Dashboard to erase them, I used windows Disk Manager and Diskpart. Neither of these tools comment about security state. I used Clean All in Diskpart, so the drive was completely zeroed. Yet even after rebooting the computer, Dashboard still thinks the drives are “Frozen”.
I tried chatting with WD and the person was handwaving and clearly had no idea what to do.
How can I clear the security state?
