Unlocking storage devices locked using a password made of scancodes

Today marks the third time now that I have encountered problems unlocking solid state drives locked by Dell staff laptops. The problem here lies in the way that the BIOS interprets the data that constitutes your hard drive password. Many BIOSes (I am ignorant of what UEFI does here, it may take a more high-level approach) do not store your password in a character encoded format, but instead as a sequence of keyboard scancodes.

This sometimes also has the consequence that passwords become case insensitive, since scancodes are per-key (interestingly HP holds a patent to store case-related information for BIOS passwords, but I don't know if this also relates to passwords it applies to hard disks, or even if they use the patent right now).

You can convert your passwords to scancodes by using something like the following (this only translates part of ASCII, and assumes a US keyboard layout, but you get the idea):

<<< "The password" tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' |
    tr '1234567890qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm' '\2-\13\20-\31\36-\46\54-\62'

Note that if you are using a USB keyboard you may be using a totally different set of scancodes, and will need to translate accordingly to that instead (although some BIOSes map these to the more traditional scancodes, so maybe not).

After you've determined the right scancodes, you can feed the output to hdparm's --security-unlock or similar.