Windows 10: Anyone else here use Crucial Brand SSD's?

Use Macrium Reflect Free to make Images as backup , (make sure to make the Rescue Disk/USB) , but eventually the drive will drive you crazy so you might as well wipe the Drive per the Crucial Forum Posts and get it over with....

Good info to have here on 10 Forums I think incase it's "lost" at Crucial....................

Long story short - MX100 model support hardware based encryption and it can be used in two modes, 'ATA security features set' and 'TCG Opal'. For some reason Windows 8 and Windows 10 enable TCG Opal mode during installation, without asking user for such permission. The problem is that in most cases TCG Opal mode encryption is not enabled after installation. Moreover Windows 10 Home doesn't support such encryption but enables it anyway. As far as I understand that correctly this is the reason of the issue - during Windows 10 install the drive is switched to TCG Opal mode, it is ready to use TCG Opal commands issued by OS but the OS (let's say Windows 10 Home) doesn't support this state. It has been thoroughly decribed by other forum user, r0m30 as far as I can remember.

To fix that you would have to reinstall Windows 10 one more time according to following steps:

1. First of all you have to 'PSID revert' the MX100 drive using Crucial Storage Executive tool - it reverts the drive from TCG Opal mode back to ATA security features set. For this step the drive has to be connected as a secondary drive - you cannot PSID revert your OS drive unfortunately.
2. Then you can install Windows 10 again, however at the very begining of instalation you have to perform one of the available actions to prevent Windows 10 from switching the drive to TCG Opal mode again - here are possible solutions.
( see page 6 for a walk through too by musigreg)

Two days ago I have been installing W10 and fortunately I remembered about that. I have used Reg add... command at the begining of install.

Note: Before applying any of the workarounds the drive should be in ATA Security mode. So if the drive is in TCG Opal mode you should PSID revert it first.


So it seems that I can share following workarounds that works on my systems in order to prevent silent TCG Opal activation on the drives during W8.x/W10 install:

- it works - create small partition at the end of the clean drive (with Parted Magic I have created 300 MB ntfs partition at the end of the empty drive) and then install Windows. This seems to be quite simple solution

- it works - set ATA HDD password on the drive if your motherboard/laptop supports it and then install Windows

- it works - Shift+F10 at the begining of install (for example at this screen) and run following command (this is single line command)
Reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\EnhancedStorageDevices" /v TCGSecurityActivationDisabled /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

* You can also create small batch file (.bat extension) with the above command, place it on USB thumbdrive, Shift+F10 at the begining of install and run that .bat file.