Mother-in-law went to hospital for a couple of months and when she got back her laptop didn't power up. All her passwords etc are on it, so I removed the drive so I could clone it. It seems there's some form of encryption on it. She never entered any passwords or anything, so this is perhaps HP:s own encryption, or whatever.

Trying to mount it I get this in dmesg:



"32kb" tells me it has to be some kind of encryption / key part for the whole drive (I'm just guessing). The drive itself is an Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series 180GB, while the laptop is an HP EliteBook 850.

I guess that my only chance here is to get the laptop repaired, but after 2 hours of error searching I end up with nothing. I can confirm that the power intake is OK, and that the power button switches from 3.3V to GND when pressed, and that the battery voltage is running steady at 3.3V (i.e. not charging), but that's it.

Is there any chance to decrypt the drive without the laptop (I repeat: she does not have any passwords or anything), or is the only option that I try again to dig down on the motherboard trying to repair it?

The MIL is pretty devastated here, and so am I because I feel kind of useless not being able to help.

first try to remove all batterys from notebook for about 30 minutes
second pres power button for 30seconds
put battery back and try

HP have a couple of recovery options for things going pear-shaped.

I look after over 400 HP 640 G4's, some 6470b's, 450's and a few other models. Had a few times where laptop would not power up. in only 3 cases, everything failed and we had mainboard replaced.

if you search you will find exact procedures, but from memory there are things like holding windows+B, Windows+v etc to clear CMOS cache or factory reset. This info I remember was not extremely easy to find, but have a look.

also, keep that HDD clone safe.... even though it doesn't sound like a HDD issue.

the ProBook 640 in particular, has a strange thing where it won't power up, so close lid, tilt back and forth in an exaggerated fashion a few times, open lid and try again. I think some kind of tilt/gyro sensor.

BTW, a windows laptop?

I am very inexperienced in this subject however this looks similar to 3 240gb Kingston SSDs we have that show the same sandforce controller and 32kb. I believe our conclusion was that for some reason the disk is mounting the on-board 32k flash of the controller and not the main flash cells, something to do with Windows 10 sleep or hibernate?

I hope that gets you some kind of lead.