Lenovo laptop user
As a daily user of several ThinkPad Lenovo and the older IBM laptop computers (at work and at home private) I am sorry about the experience I recently had with Lenovo!
I am sorry for 2 reasons:
- I expect there to be some problems with the Lenovo fingerprint software.. not just any problems, but some that has now made my harddrive data inaccessible.. ie. I have lost data that i do not have backed up! Fortunately that is not much data, because I upload frequently to flickr and burn backup to dvd!..
- When trying to get help with the data problem, and discuss what happend in order to avoid and explain, on the Lenovo forums, I got 2 good replies, then without notice the thread was deleted. Now we might never know if there are indeed flaws in the Lenovo software, if there is a solution that can recover or bring back my data or my old XP installation..or it was simply just me that used the fingerprint software wrong!
It was very helpful replies that explain some of the problems and possible reasons, so deleting the texts is very annoying for me! And the discussion was ongoing, I still have questions that was left unanswered. All the answers could have been helpful for others in the future..
Original Lenovo forum posting
Well for my future reference, I will save the information here, so i have it, and maybe someone else will find it useful:
I posted the following question on the Lenovo forum:
Hi
I am having trouble mounting and accessing data on my old lenovo r60 thinkpad hdd which had xp before.
what happened:
1) i decided to disable the fingerprint software because i had been in the garden and my fingers was scratched so it kept failing, but obviously i got in after many retries
2) i chose restart computer and it booted up and i had to logon with password. all looked good and i was happy
3) next day i started computer, and now it asks for a password i dont have. the password it asks for is illustraded with what looks like a Database icon and has a number 1 shown. Problem is, I do not have that password and i dont even remember setting it
4) So i took the old disk out of my R60, putted in a new disk, and installed windows xp on this new disk
5) Inside Windows XP, i try to mount the old disk using usb, but xp only see the disk, it sees no partitions
6) I used some recovery tools, because i thought all of a sudden the disk had gone bad,.. which would be really bad luck, it has been working fine for a long time. But anyway, when i scan for partitions, software finds no partitions, and the errormessage is a lot of "read error" for cylinders.
It is almost as if the disk has been encrypted somehow, but that is not something i know or have done myself.
Is this some kind of security setting from Lenovo software that i can undo directly on the disk?
Or can i get around the password prompt and just boot back into my old Windows XP installation?
Or is the disk just plain defect all of a sudden...
The first reply i got, pointed me in the direction of "It sounds like you have a ATA harddisk password lock on the disk". Of course now that reply is deleted, but i think the most important was something like:
It sounds like you have a ATA harddisk password lock set
The fingerprint software has supplied the ATA HDD unlock password, and when you made the hot boot in 2) you didnt notice any problem because the drive only needs unlock once it has been powered on.After the cold restart you need to enter the ATA HDD password because the fingerprint software no longer does it for you. Unfortunately you will be out of luck trying to enable the fingerprint software again as you can not boot the drive.
Alright this made very much sense to me, it sounds exactly like i have had some ATA password set. The problem is i dont remember setting it in any Lenovo software and I dont remember what password was used.
My Reply
So i replied to the thread with some clarifications, questions and suggestions for improvements of the Lenovo fingerprint software.. that reply is also deleted from the forum ofcourse, but it was something like:
When the old disk is attached with external USB cable, XP device manager shows the disk, but inside Disk Management there is no disk to work with.I used an open source free partition recovery tool (which i used in the past to restore a mbr on a drive that would not boot) TestDisk [http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk], which does show the disk, but analyzing the disk gives just a lot of read errors.I also tried scanning the attached disk with a free trial of File Scavenger, but that also gave no results. So i am afraid it is a ATA lock password problem.1)It bothers me that that I disabled the fingerprint software, only because it took me many retries after I had been to the garden and got some scratches. I couldnt figure out how to change the only 3 retries of striking the finger, is it possible to change that? It bothers me because i would give a lot to be able to turn fingerprint security back on now, but I cant because the drive is locked!! It would make much sense to me if Lenovo had a tool that could turn on fingerprint security again.. WITHOUT going into windows of course!?2)It also bothers me that the fingerprint software allows me to turn off fingerprint security without giving me some kind of major warning: WHEN YOU TURN OFF FINGERPRINT SECURITY, YOU NEED THE ATA HDD PASSWORD IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO START WINDOWS AGAIN.. ARE YOU SURE YOU HAVE THIS PASSWORD OR DO YOU WANT TO SET A NEW OR REMOVE THAT PASSWORD? ... how simple would this be.. and how nice ...could have saved me data loss... I mean after all the Lenovo fingerprint software must know, or be able to detect, that there is a HDD lock on the disk because the software has handled the single-sign-on for drive unlock until now!!! sigh3)Finally it bothers me that the Fingerprint software does not have a clear tab for "setting/changing the ATA lock password".. If there had been such a place i would have seen it, and possibly i would have changed the password, or even turned it off!!
I feel these texts inside the thread are very important for me and other Lenovo endusers... too bad the thread has been deleted.. very sad judgement from the Lenovo forum administrators or moderators or whoever deleted it:
I hoped to get help from Lenovo about this, but no.. and not only do they not help, they even worked against me by deleting my post for help :-( what a pity ..but i will keep using the Lenovo laptops as I have for many years ... this is just a bit sad, and of course i will never use the Lenovo fingerprint software ever again..
So.... anyway, i have some data on that drive which are of very big importance to me, so i will continue for some days to find a solution, possibly paying for a unlock of the drive [http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/] which seems to be the only way:
With Repair Station you can:
- remove an unknown ATA-password; both security levels are supported: High and Maximum
- diagnose and recover HDD firmware area
ATA Passwords...Repair Station has the ability to access the Firmware Area and reset the password, thus making your hard drive unlocked. Unlocking process is done automatically and takes just a few minutes.Since Repair Station does not alter partitions or file systems, it is absolutely safe to your data.
There is a free diagnose trial of the software, but it requires that the disk is mounted on motherboard and not with USB cable. When I get a chance, I will run the diagnose..
