New Laptop Conundrum!!! OS locks down.

[plasticookie]

I'll try to be brief and to the point. I bought a laptop off ebay listed as "has bios password"...Turns out it had a bios supervisor password and a windows password. Long story short, I managed to remove both passwords and ended up formatting the hard drive after figuring out it had a password protected version of Deep Freeze, ugh! Upon reinstalling windows 7 everything was hunky dory for a couple hours, but then out of the blue a white screen takes over and states that computer belongs to "xxxxxx" and is rendered unusable. Next, I booted a live linux cd, wiped the harddrive, and set all values to zero. Thinking this would remove any pesky security programs that apparently were still lurking on the HD. Reinstalled windows 7 again. Same result. There is some kind of embedded security and I can't figure out how to remove or disable it. I thought it must be on the HD, but I don't know how that is possible since I ran dd if=/dev/zero. Any ideas??? (Note: I noticed a windows ems boot menu after I formatted????) Please help

[oz]

Hello and welcome aboard!

Don't know but it sounds like it could be stolen property in which case the ebay seller could likely provide the best support, or perhaps a refund. Even if it's not stolen, it would seem the seller should have the info you need to get past this issue if it was acquired legitimately by him/her.

Have you checked the Deep Freeze website for workarounds to their security efforts?

Maybe if all else fails, file a claim with eBay.

[plasticookie]

The ebay seller is a pawn shop, so their information would be limited. I could probably get a refund, but i'd rather figure out a way to fix this. I'm running pinguy on a usb right now. I'm fairly certain deep freeze is gone. It's something else: bios, motherboard, remote server, or some encrypted file on the hd that wiping the drive didn't get rid of. I'm going to check in on whether it's stolen, but I still wanna figure this out in the interim. OCD thing....

[plasticookie]

Here's an update if anyone cares. I removed the HardDrive from my Dell XPS(7 professional 32-bit installed) and replaced the toshiba HD(7 home premium 64-bit installed)...Of course, I had to tweak the drivers, but it has been running fine all day. I am also currently running dban to wipe the other HD, but this still doesn't make sense to me. I wiped the drive and set the values to zero using linux, how could that have missed something? If there is embedded security hardware why is it not responding to a new drive...

[plasticookie]

Captain's log star date 1540.0.......Turns out Computrace-Lojack is installed as firmware(rpcnet.exe), that explains how it reinstalls itself on a freshly formatted drive. Security measures found to date: bios password, windows password, deepfreeze, and Lojack...