Using the Drive-Trust-Alliance sedutil on a Dell Precision T1700 Small Form Factor, circa 2015

[britcan]

I write this post primarily to save anyone trying to use this specific Dell system and possibly (speculation) other Dell machines of similar age and specifications from going down the rabbit hole that I went down trying to get drive locking to work. This post is specific to the:

Dell Precision T1700 Small Form Factor circa 2015, fourth generation i7 processor, Samsung 870 EVO SSD.

Background: I am not a developer. I have successfully used msed and sedutil since msed was first introduced on a number of systems. I experienced a minor problem some years ago with the Crucial MX200 where I could not turn locking off but this was inconsequential to my use. The Dell Precision T1700 is the first time I have run into serious problems.

ONLY WORKING SOLUTION: From what I can tell Opal 2 drive locking works on this machine only when using legacy BIOS boot mode and when using biospba-1.10.img for the PBA and Rescue-1.10.img to set the drive up. Every other version I tried failed. I believe biospba-1.10.img and Rescue-1.10.img were released in late 2015 according to my notes. I have not gone through this Github site to locate these files, I had them stored locally from years back.

The original msed rescue stick booted the system fine and allowed drive set-up but it did not work.

I tried the latest versions of the utilities BIOS32.img and UEFI64limg booting from a USB stick; neither would finish booting. BIOS32.img hung at "Loading Kernel". I tested this on another machine and it completed successfully so this is specific to the Dell.

I believe I tried some other older versions of sedutil-cli when I first tried using a Crucial MX200 in this machine. They also failed.