2nd hand laptop has encription.. uhoh!

[chrestomanci]

Thx chaps, the laptop is a Toshiba Portege and the software is Sophos Safeguard.

Is it worth contacting Sophos and asking them for help? Or look on their website for knowledge base articles. They probably can't unlock the bios without the code, but if you know the code they should be able to tell you how to stop it prompting for it at every boot.

[PK71]

The error on the install is as per edit. No Code. Partition Magic says BAD. If I go to put a partition on it, system needs a reboot and then fails saying MBR error and reboots in the same state. I will check to see what exactly PM says regarding the MBR. brb.

Is it worth contacting Sophos and asking them for help? Or look on their website for knowledge base articles. They probably can't unlock the bios without the code, but if you know the code they should be able to tell you how to stop it prompting for it at every boot.

That problem is solved bud thx. I got some new ones now. lol

Partition Magic says:
BADMBR
error 4 while executing batch
error 4 bad argument/parameter

Then reboots.

[Agent]

Partition Magic is very, very old. No wonder it's not working.

Use parted magic. It's free. Just burn it to a disk and you'll get an easy to use Linux environment where you can work with the drive.

[PK71]

Partition Magic is very, very old. No wonder it's not working.

Use parted magic. It's free. Just burn it to a disk and you'll get an easy to use Linux environment where you can work with the drive.

Great thx Agent not heard of that I will investigate.

[PK71]

Solved thx for everyone's advice.

Partition Magic was indeed complicating the issue. I manage to get a good partition on using the windows partition tool in the end. Doh.
Other school boy error re the install was windows couldnt see a drive to install to while installing from usb. What I didnt realise was there were 2 usb slots on the notebook and the one I was using was usb3 and this was causing problems. Anyway freshly burned install disc got me there in the end.
Thx again.

[Jessie James]

I recently ran into this same problem, and wanted to post another solution as this came up high in the Google search results when I was looking for a way to remove the sophos safeguard from a SSD.

You got a USB key? If so then you can build a bootable disk with either DBAN or something similar to run a secure wipe of the disk. Dependent on the size of the encrypted disk, the interface and the CPU this *may* take some time.

This is the way to go.

I downloaded DBAN, burned the ISO to a CD, booted to it, and ran the automatic ("autonuke" I think?) option. For me it only took 45 minutes, and my PC now is able to use the SSD and I can install Windows.

Thanks Splash, you helped a lot.

[watercooled]

Just an FYI for anyone else who might stumble across this thread, it's generally advisable to avoid unnecessarily overwriting an SSD, and the autonuke option on DBAN does several passes IIRC. It should be more than sufficient to either overwrite the first few MB of the disk (e.g. with dd in Linux) or use the drive's built-in secure erase function which will at most use one erase cycle and complete in seconds for modern SSDs.

[peterb]

Just an FYI for anyone else who might stumble across this thread, it's generally advisable to avoid unnecessarily overwriting an SSD, and the autonuke option on DBAN does several passes IIRC. It should be more than sufficient to either overwrite the first few MB of the disk (e.g. with dd in Linux) or use the drive's built-in secure erase function which will at most use one erase cycle and complete in seconds for modern SSDs.

And the original problem, wining the MBR and primary partition table could have been solved with a Linux live CD/DVD and careful use of dd.

However, alls well that ends well