Hi all,

Today we installed a new system at a customer site.

All installed cameras are working correctly, however we are unable to record anything due to an issue with the hard drive installation.

The device keeps asking for a password when installing a new hard disk, which prevents us from unlocking or initializing it.

We have tested two brand-new drives, but both require a password even though they are new out of the box and have never been used.

When attempting to unlock the drives, we tried multiple options such as:

• empty password
• admin
• 1234
• admin1234

None of these worked.

The NVR does detect the drives (showing ~989GB for the 1TB drive and ~500GB for the 512GB drive), but:

• the disks cannot be initialized
• the disks cannot be unlocked

We have never encountered this issue before, and as a result, the system is currently unusable (no recording possible).

This is not acceptable for us or for the customer, and we now have to return on-site to resolve this.

For reference:

• We tested both a 512GB SSD and a 1TB WD Green HDD
• The issue occurs with both drives
• The NVR continuously asks for a password to unlock/use the disk

We also attempted the following:

• Formatting the drives (twice) to FAT32 and NTFS
• Performing a full wipe using diskpart (clean)
• Removed all data/partitions again, and even we did a clean without any formatting after.

None of these steps resolved the issue.

Question:
Is this a firmware issue or a known problem with this TP-Link device?
How can we fix this?