Recycling hard drive?

Hi,

This is my first posting to this forum but I have been reading posts on-and-of for some time. I have found answers to most of my problems in the past simply by reading past postings. But the time has finally come to pose a question of my own to hopefully clear up some ambiguity.

Background...
For the past few years I have got into the habit of salvaging old laptop SATA hard drives, fitting them into an enclosure and using them as external storage via a USB adapter. This policy has worked well and with every passing year the average storage capacity of recycled hard-drives has increased.

One of my recent aquisitions is an old Acer Aspire F5-571 with Windows 10 installed on a 1TB hard disk. The laptop works fine and came supplied with the Windows admin and user passwords. All good but I plan to replace the hard disk for an SSD to perk-up performance and also give me a clean slate to work with ready for installing Linux Q4OS. I am not anti Windows its just that I want to explore Linux distros and the Acer would seem to offer a good test platform.

My plan for the old 1 TB drive is to delete the resident Windows, re-partition the drive so it supports both NTFS and EXT4, fit the drive into a prtable USB enclosure and then use it as an external storage device. The problem is that the Acer BIOS shows the drive as being "frozen" yet it still boots up into Windows ok and everthing appears to function correctly.

Reading posts on this and other forums would suggest that because of the "frozen" status the drive may not work if removed from the laptop. Just to be clear, I do not want to save Windows or any existing data on the drive but would like to reformat and re-use the drive as an external storage device.

I have allways understood the term "locked" as a reference to a password protected or encrypted drive but the term "frozen" has also been linked to an encypted drive. My laptop BIOS screen reports the hard disk as "frozen" but at no time does the laptop or windows ask for a password other than the usual admin account or user account passwords. After reading a number of posts I now find myself confused as to the meaning of the terms "frozen" and "locked" with respect to hard drives and wondered if someone could clarify the meaning of the terms please?

Bottom line, will it be possible to re-format and re-use a previously "frozen" hard-disk as an exteral USB storage device or will I be forced to send the old drive to the recycle centre?

Thanks in advance.

angrybios

 

The “frozen” status you’re seeing is just a BIOS security flag that prevents changes to the drive’s security settings while running—it doesn’t mean the disk is unusable. Since it boots fine, you can safely wipe, re-partition, and re-use it in a USB enclosure. Once reformatted, it should work as normal external storage without issue.