Cannot securely erase drive data on frozen drives
Use this information to troubleshoot issues when secure erase fails on SATA hard drives with the error Disks are frozen and cannot be erased.
Onboard SATA hard drives are in the frozen state by default. If the server has a frozen drive, Lenovo XClarity Administrator temporarily unfreezes the frozen drive and then boots to Bare Metal Update (BMU) to erase the drive. When the XClarity Administrator BMU quits and the server boots to the operating system, the drive becomes frozen again automatically.
When a server is managed in XClarity Administrator using managed authentication mode, the XClarity Administrator creates the SYSMGR_xxx LDAP account to manage and monitor the server instead of local credentials (see Managing the authentication server). The SYSMGR_xxx LDAP account does not have an IPMI privilege, so XClarity Administrator cannot unfreeze the disk, causing the secure-erase operation to fail on that server.
To resolve this issue, manage the server using local authentication mode, and then attempt to securely erase the drives.