Friday, May 25, 2018

How to Remove Known Password from Secondary Hard Drive Not Appearing in BIOS

I have a Dell Inspiron 7567 laptop with two hard drives. I added password protection using the Dell BIOS to both hard drives. Once I added password protection, both hard drives worked well, and I could see and interact with all the files on both.


Unfortunately, I discovered that upon a restart, the second hard drive did not appear in Windows Explorer, or even as a partition in Disk Management. Windows cannot see it at all.


However, if during the boot-up I enter the BIOS, after leaving the BIOS, I am presented with a BIOS pop-up window that says "Hard-Drive #XXXXX, the system internal HDD-1, is protected by a password authentication system. You cannot access data on this hard drive without the correct password. Please type in the hard drive password." When I enter the correct password, I can see the second hard drive without issue. However, as soon as I put the computer to Sleep, Hibernate, or Restart (without entering the BIOS), the second hard drive disappears, and Windows cannot see it. The only way to see the 2nd hard drive in Windows 10 is to ensure that you enter the BIOS before booting Windows.


I have since done some research, and realised that the Dell hard drive passwords are not very secure, and that disk encryption is better (using Bitlocker or Veracrypt). I entered the BIOS, and found the setting for the primary hard drive password, and removed it. However, while the secondary hard drive appears in the basic BIOS, it is missing from the Dell Advanced BIOS where password protection is added or removed. I have spent hours searching for how to turn off the password for the second hard drive (in the BIOS settings, and online solutions), but I cannot figure out how to remove the password from the second hard drive. I cannot get the second hard drive to appear in the Dell Advance BIOS ("advanced", because you can navigate with a mouse).

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