11-11-2023 07:32 PM
I may have stumbled upon an undocumented feature in the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme. I had a hardware-encrypted SSD which wasn’t working on one motherboard, and I attached it to the Asus one hoping for better luck.
On boot, I got a blue prompt with the model of my SSD followed by “Enter Admin password:” There’s space for 32 asterisks in the text box. But even though I know the password, the BIOS keeps reporting otherwise, repeating the prompt again and again. Pressing ESC finally causes it to pop up “Invalid Password. TCG Storage device is locked.”
I applied the encryption using sedutil-cli with the -n flag to send the password to the drive as plain text. What is the BIOS doing differently that it cannot unlock the drive using the most basic password encoding?