How to remove Dell Data Security Preboot from erased disk?

I've got a 256GB SSD, that's got a DDS PBA on it from our old company. The encryption server no longer exists, so we can't log into it to disable it. The rest of the disk has already been erased, but we can't get rid of the 100MB or so area reserved by the PBA, and thus can't install any other operating systems on the disk (the computer still boots the PBA!). Is there any other way to remove that PBA, or fully erase the disk? I've tried Gparted, DBAN, the Dell WinPE recovery images...nothing worked. Even the recovery images didn't work because they said the disk was no longer encrypted, but that PBA is still there! Please help!!!

Responses(2)

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SteveO1683

Moderator

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146 Posts

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November 16th, 2020 07:00

Hi @equinox,

Depending on the drive manufacture they might support a method of resetting the drive back to factory default via a identification number on the physical drive. If the drive is made by Samsung they call this PSID Revert.

The PBA is actually written to an area outside the normal storage of your drive and that is why no utilities you've tried have worked since the PBA actually isn't part of the logical disk. If the encryption server is no longer accessible the only method of resetting the drive would be if the vendor supported a factory reset option similar to what Samsung provides.

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equinox

2 Posts

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November 16th, 2020 08:00

Thanks Steve, I'll look into this. The drive is made by Hynix, hopefully they'll have something I can use.

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