I’m hoping someone on this list will be able to shed some light on our situation.
We (on behalf of a customer) are trying to use the ‘Secure Erase’ feature from the ATA command set but we’re running into problems. Our drives always show up as ‘frozen’ (based on a couple different utilities) when booted into Windows, which prevents the ‘Secure Erase’. We figured it was the BIOS doing the ‘freezing’ and since we license our BIOS code, we tried removing the ‘freezing’ operations. However, the drives still show up as ‘frozen’.
My question is: Does Windows (XP to be specific) automatically perform the ‘freeze’ command on hard drives? If so, can this be prevented/disabled?
Thank you!
I’m not aware of Windows doing anything to set the freeze lock on devices at startup.
XP, particularly, predates most of the security-conscious boot features (TPM support and the like), and still uses the older Windows boot code. That doesn’t mean XP isn’t doing it… it just means that I’ve never heard of any version of Windows setting the freeze lock, and would be surprised if XP did this.
Like you, I was under the impression that the freeze lock was the sole province of the BIOS.
Have you tried putting the drive on a driver analyzer to see what’s going on and when?? That’s what I would do…
Peter
OSR
Thanks for the reply Peter. What exactly do you mean by ‘driver analyzer’? If you have anywhere to point me I would greatly appreciate it.
Josh
Did you do the cold boot?
Alex,
I’m not sure what you mean. The drive was frozen whether the system was brought up from full power-off or was simply rebooted.
Josh
SRI… make that “DRIVE analyzer” as in bus analyzer between HBA and HDD – My fingers are pre-programmed for typing “driver” apparently 
Peter
OSR
xxxxx@rtd.com wrote:
I’m not sure what you mean. The drive was frozen whether the system was brought up from full power-off or was simply rebooted.
I suspect Alex was making a pun – a “frozen” drive on a “cold” boot.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
Peter:
Thanks, I’ll see if we have anything available.
Tim:
I thought so too, but without emoticons you can’t be too careful!
Well, that’s not a pun. To reset some modes, one may need to power the drive down completely. A boot after complete power down (preferably without even Vaux) is called cold boot, as opposed to warm reboot while under un-interrupted power.
Mr. Strouse,
I don’t know whether this will be helpful or not, but I just did a drive analyzer trace on a secondary drive booting Windows 7. Well, actually, this drive has the system reserved partition on it. But, whatever. Knowing you were interested in the FREEZE LOCK behavior, and with my own curiosity piqued, I looked for when the freeze lock was set.
I see exactly one SECURITY FREEZE LOCK command being issued during startup. This is issued just after the final OOB sequence sent to the drive (which is after a lot of READ DMA EXT commands), immediately following an IDENTIFY DEVICE and a couple of SET FEATURES commands… just before I see a the first READ FPDMA QUEUED commands for sector zero.
I’ve also compared this to another trace I happen to have lying around of the boot process, and it is similar.
My point is, I don’t know if this SECURITY FREEZE LOCK command is being sent by the BIOS or by Windows, but given its position in the stream of commands, it looks like it COULD be coming from Windows.
I’d be very happy to send you either or both traces. One is from a LeCroy analyzer and the other is from a SerialTek. You’ll have to register at either LeCroy’s site or SerialTek’s site to download their software (but it IS free).
Again, I have no idea if any of this is helpful, but at the very least it’s providing you some info.
Peter
OSR
Mr. Viscarola,
That’s very interesting indeed. Thank you so much! I would very much like to look at the traces. You can email them to me: **jstrouse**at**rtd.com**. Or if you want to upload them somewhere you can send me links. Thank you again. If I find anything out about this, I will post it.
Josh
After doing some research and some testing with BIOS modifications, it appears that Windows (XP SP3) is freezing drives on its own. We’ve been able to stop the BIOS from freezing the drive, which allows the drive to be unfrozen when booting to DOS. With the same BIOS, booting to Windows shows the drive as frozen. Our BIOS engineer also found something online that said Windows freezes drives, though the statement was not from Microsoft directly. Thanks for everyone’s help.
I have some more information regarding this issue. It appears that Windows XP does freeze the drive, but it does so in the IDE hard drive controller driver. When we changed our SATA controller from IDE to AHCI mode, we had to change to an Intel AHCI driver, rather than using the built-in IDE driver. When we did this, the drive would no longer come up as frozen. We were then able to perform the Secure Erase function as originally hoped for.
Thanks to everyone for their help, especially Peter.
Good job. Glad to hear you found the root-cause of your problem.
(Thank you for re-posting, Mr. Strouse… I saw your initial attempt last night while cleaning up. I appreciate you taking the time to re-post this information.)
Peter
OSR