Thinkpads Forum

Greetings,

I've had my X200 since last July and have been very happy with it. I enabled hard drive encryption in the BIOS after I purchased the machine, and it's worked perfectly.

This morning however, it stopped accepting my hard drive encryption password, so I'm unable to boot. I've been using the same password since day 1 and have never changed it. I removed the hard drive, cleaned the bay and replaced it, but that didn't help. The drive makes its usual clicking sounds during power up and there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary with it. It didn't suffer any significant bumps or knocks since I switched off the evening before.

With the drive removed, I can enter into the BIOS (which I protected using the same password), but not with the drive in the machine.

This is annoying because I can't rely on a feature that was one of the machine's strongest selling points for me, and I'll have to replace the drive at my cost because support will argue that I just suffered amnesia.

Has anyone here ever seen this happen with hard drive encryption?

Not trying to be a troll but, are you sure no one changed it without you knowing it...?

I Googled a bit and found some sporadic reports possibly similar to yours. Some of them are Toshiba-related; One of them is about the T61 and a BIOS upgrade apparently went amiss, that's BIOS password not HDD password through (http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7587_102-0. ... dID=291688). Another ThinkPad-related is that the keyboard has malfunctioned (http://www.techtalkz.com/laptops/304296 ... sword.html). Some even said that it could be caused by computer virus.

However, judging by the number of days past without anyone answering to your post, it could be an "once in a blue moon" event.

BTW, what's your HDD model and have you called Lenovo support...?

Cheers.