Lenovo fingerprint software problems, a ATA locked HDD i can not access

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:

1. 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!.. 
2. 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...

First reply
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!!! sigh

3)

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:

Disk with Lenovo fingerprint protection cannot be mounted on another Windows XP

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.. 

Starting a blog, handling knowledge management

Welcome to my blog, thanks for visiting!

I have started this blog to improve my knowledge management system! In short this blog will contain all information i feel like saving! For more details of the entire system, see later.

The need for an improvement to my knowledge mangement came up this month, when I got a new job! At my new job I can no longer commit/checkout my personal Subversion or CVS repositories. And I dont have access to Firefox, so I am also missing my bookmark sync-and-sort plugin!

Things you wont find here are real personal information or notes that are confidential, which will have to stay on my PC or in a special Subversion repository for that.

So to summarise my knowledge management system as of today, it consist of the following:

• Ideas/readme/snip commits used to be saved in Subversion, but probably this will go into this blog from now on!
• Personal scripts will still go into personal Subversion repositories, as it is easier to deploy to servers. Snippets from those will go to the blog when appropriate.
• Howtos/working notes probably will stay in the appropriate CVS/Subversion repositories for a while. This is not optimal for sharing with more than a few people, so snippets will be in this blog!
• Pictures go to appropriate flickr accounts: personal or family, available to anyone, family or friends.
• Videos unfortunately can not be put into flickr. A place like flickr, with video power like youtube would be nice! Any ideas.
• E-mail will probably move more and more into gmail, as that will hopefully be availble anywhere i ever need it.
• The few websites i help o webmaster, are saved in a Subversion.
• Instant messaging logs are not central or searchable, this would be nice to see.
• I dont contribute to any particular Wiki anywhere, neither do I have one of my own.
• I dont contribute to a particular forum, neither do I have one of my own.
• I have not yet started using VoIP or mobile technology beyond low-tech personal use.
• Daily top urls to visit (bookmark management) will stay in Sync-and-sort for now, but should not grow into a mess like recently. Instead i will post on this blog, including my thoughts of a particular url. I have a few ideas for better bookmark management so i dont have to use sync-and-sort.
• Book reviews and notes will move from Subversion to this blog.

Search capabilities within all systems is of great importance, and if I was to share knowledge i tend to say good search possibility is the most important requirement of a knowledge system! Otherwise you will risk the system never gets used.

For my own setup above, a generic search across all systems is not available to me, I have to search each of the knowledge system parts in what ever I can. This is one of the reasons i prefer any format that is text based, because then at least i can grep for one word. I would really like to have a single point of entry search engine which can crawl any of the above! Limiting access to see and perform searches within certain data would be paramount! I am not aware of a product that can do this. For the enterprise at work we will take a look the Google search appliance, but for my personal usage i hope to find something similar that is available in some open source project?

The IBM quickr approach is appealing to me, at least from a coorperate knowledge sharing point of view. It seems perfect for Notes environments, but unfortunately i have not had a chance to try it out yet! I wish there was an open source alternative with similar functionality i could play with. A google search got me to Sun portal server but it 1) it might not be what i want and 2) has some pretty hard technical requirements for me to get started, so i will probably never know about the first issue.

I dont know how other technical people cope with the difficulties of handling job and personal knowledge management systems? Undoubtedly it must raise problems with regards to people loosing their notes if they change job or job position, and it goes without saying that you can not mirror work knowledge mangement systems off for your personal usage! As work and personal life keeps merging, this issue will keep popping up.