hdparm, SATA secure erase, known password

  I was following this to secure-erase a used HDD. However, the computer was restarted before the erase completed. So, this is a case of known password. I thought that if I power cycled, and kept power on, the erase would finish. And it did, but the password was still active: Every boot requested this password during BIOS/UEFI startup.

  Though it was not obvious because of how it was setup, it is possible to bypass this password. The result is that the drive is not accessible normally.

  If the correct password is given during startup, the drive is accessible, but I was not able to disable security using hdparm on that power up. It seems like the key was to not give the password during startup and then use hdparm with the known correct password. 

HEIC HEIF errors after LMDE upgrade

I had been running LMDE 4 on my desktop for a while. It was mostly ok other than niggling issues like ethernet going off and on.

0:1f.6 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V [8086:15b8]

I had lots of pictures in HEIC from an iphone. Wanting to use ImageViewer to look at them, I read about installing heif-gdk-pixbuf . But it did not seem to be available for LMDE 4. GIMP worked to look at the files.

So I updated to LMDE 5 . After some gyrations, this completed. However, neither ImageViewer nor GIMP could open the pictures anymore.I again updated to LMDE 6. Same issue.

Perhaps this was the clue:

heif-info IMG_6553.HEIC
heif-info: error while loading shared libraries: libx265.so.165: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

In desperation, I downloaded and installed this from debian.
https://packages.debian.org/buster/libx265-165

After that GIMP started opening the files. Redo from start.