Password protected hard drive from Virus or trojan

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Gary_49

Commendable
Mar 30, 2016
2
0
1,510
I was running Avast on my computers. About a month ago I decided to give McAfee a try. I don't know if this was a problem before installing McAfee or not. But sometime in this period after installing McAfee I started having problems. McAfee removed several things it didn't like. Still having problems at this point so I also installed malware bytes. It removed even more junk. Then my DVD drive started popping in and out. I have tested the drive is fine. I can run Linux Mint and the drive works fine. I am also having problems reading anything in that drive in Windows 10. I bought a larger primary drive to reload windows on. Put it on the computer and formatted it to test. When I tried to load windows I get an error code telling me that "Windows cannot find or access selected drive". When I go out of windows (installation disk) to boot I get a bios screen telling me that all my drives are password protected. So I am assuming that this threat is still on my computer and it looks like the only solution is to toss all the drives data and all and replace them. It seems that this thing spread to all my drives and I fear that even connecting them again will reinfect anything new. There are three drives affected as far as I can tell one is a Samsung two are WD there are two more WD drives running in RAID 1 on an add in card. I can't tell if the RAID ones are affected or not but I have to assume they are or can be. I don't want to connect them directly to the motherboard drive controller because the surely will be then.

I have several thoughts. For one this might be a ransom virus that I circumvented with McAfee and it did it's deed because I never got the ransom message. Anybody know a way out of this and where to start? In all my years of computing I have never come across anything like this and I wonder what anyone got out of it.
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

Titan
Mar 25, 2010
60,387
1,081
152,940
Remove all the drives, put in that new one you got, boot off the Windows setup disk, can you install Windows then? What exactly is that message about passwords? The drive passwords are set in firmware, and will show up even if you try to boot the computer normally, is that what happens?

If you do have passwords set on the drives, the only place you can get help is from the hard drive vendors.
 
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G

Gary_49

Commendable
Mar 30, 2016
2
0
1,510
To: Hang-the-9
Nope that doesn't work. The problem is that when a drive is locked like this one, Windows and Linux (I tried both) setup can't access the drive primary area. The moment I try to do anything to the drive I get an error from the installation program saying it can't access the drive. Whenever I drop back to the BIOS to try a reboot I then get a a blue block from three of the drives that asks for a password to unlock the drives. That is the problem I can't even low level format the drives the same thing happens. I can read and write files to and from the drives, they had a partition. They are just locked. Everything I read says that you have to have the password that locked the drive. I wish the drive manufacturers would put some sort of physical lock on the drives so you could disable password locking if you want to when they are new.
 
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