What is a Freeze Lock?
Freeze locks are ATA commands that prevent interaction with certain drive features, including removal of HPA and DCO areas, password settings and, more crucially, Secure Erase. A freeze lock is activated by many modern BIOS versions and prevents the user from fulfilling the aforementioned sanitization requirements.
Freeze locks were developed as a preemptive protection measure against malicious software attacks on HDDs. A virus that triggers unsolicited erasure operations or locks the drive with a password unknown to the user could be prevented with this measure.
Are there any work-around solutions?
To achieve the best sanitization results possible, removal of any applied freeze lock becomes crucial. A manual removal option exists through performing a power cycle via unplugging either the drive’s power or signal cable while the software is loading.