Hey folks,
My friends mom recently retired from work and she was allowed to take her work laptop with her. Unfortunately she cant remember the passwords for her PointSec security clearance and has no way of getting them back. She just wants me to wipe the hard drive clean, no data recovery necessary. I am not able to log into the laptop, or access windows anyway only the BIOS, which also has high level encryption not allowing me to change any settings.
Heres what ive tried:
-Hooking the drive up to my computer and formatting. The drive doesnt show up in my computer, and in disk manager it shows up as "Unallocated and not Initialized." Right clicking on the drive only gives me the option to initialize, uninstall and properties. Trying to initialize it only gives me the error "Cannot initialize, I/O error." Im assuming this is that PointSec crap stopping me from formatting.
-Tried DBAN hard drive killer with the drive in the laptop and using the CD on boot. Despite setting boot from CD in the BIOS, the laptop goes straight to PointSec login and wont boot from the CD. Which eliminated the possability to use the windows CD to format which is the only way Ive read online to get rid of PointSec, those must have been on earlier versions.
-As we speak im running a low level format tool with no success. Its going through each sector and coming up saying "Format Error occured at offset "insert huge number here" : 1117 - Device I/O Error." Which is the same error as i got when trying to initialize it in disk manager.
Short of buying a new hard drive and smashing this piece of crap into the ground...does anyone have any other ides of how to wipe this drive out?
My friends mom recently retired from work and she was allowed to take her work laptop with her. Unfortunately she cant remember the passwords for her PointSec security clearance and has no way of getting them back. She just wants me to wipe the hard drive clean, no data recovery necessary. I am not able to log into the laptop, or access windows anyway only the BIOS, which also has high level encryption not allowing me to change any settings.
Heres what ive tried:
-Hooking the drive up to my computer and formatting. The drive doesnt show up in my computer, and in disk manager it shows up as "Unallocated and not Initialized." Right clicking on the drive only gives me the option to initialize, uninstall and properties. Trying to initialize it only gives me the error "Cannot initialize, I/O error." Im assuming this is that PointSec crap stopping me from formatting.
-Tried DBAN hard drive killer with the drive in the laptop and using the CD on boot. Despite setting boot from CD in the BIOS, the laptop goes straight to PointSec login and wont boot from the CD. Which eliminated the possability to use the windows CD to format which is the only way Ive read online to get rid of PointSec, those must have been on earlier versions.
-As we speak im running a low level format tool with no success. Its going through each sector and coming up saying "Format Error occured at offset "insert huge number here" : 1117 - Device I/O Error." Which is the same error as i got when trying to initialize it in disk manager.
Short of buying a new hard drive and smashing this piece of crap into the ground...does anyone have any other ides of how to wipe this drive out?
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