For protecting data within a data storage system, such as a hard disk drive, security enable mode is entered. In that mode, initialization data is moved from a first area of a disk to a second area of the disk with a location of the second area being randomly generated. The initialization data is then erased from the first area. Also, a first cipher for firmware and a second cipher for a disk are both changed into a randomly generated value. Later, access to the initialization data from the second area is granted in the security enable mode if the first and second ciphers are the same.