[tde-users] how to find & format a lost SSD?

My internal 2 tb SSD has suddenly become "locked"; even though I myself didn't lock it. The good people at Mc$haft started nagging me about enabling UEFI partitioning, but I had managed to get round that by using grub instead. Now, however, that 2 tb SSD will not mount at all as a separate drive. When I try to boot from a Devuan installation USB, that works just fine, as usual ... *unless* that 2 tb USB is present in the system. I get a window asking for a password to unlock it. I never set a password for this SSD, nor an admin password (for the boot process) until the system started asking me to set one. I did manage to back up all the data on that SSD before this happened, but now I can only boot the system from a 250 gb USB, where I have installed my Devuan system, with root, swap and home partitions, and it runs nearly perfectly, just like always ... or usually always, until crap like this happens. This SSD I bought specially to put in the laptop in order to replace the factory-installed 128 gb SSD. The original factory SSD will only boot into Mc$haft's registration process. This newer SSD, where for the past couple years I have had my system installed, been running fine, will not boot at all. When it is present at boot, I cannot boot an installation USB or disc, cannot boot a repair disc, cannot even boot my home partition (the one now installed on the USB) if that 2 tb USB is present. I tried a sort of dangerous hardware hack, which was to open up the laptop, and hotplug the 2 tb SSD, just to see if the system would recognize it. So here is (are) my question(s): Can I get the system to recognize this 2 tb SSD. It is plugged in, but doesn't appear? Do I need to buy some sort of gadget (an enclosure or something?) so that I can plug in the SSD as if it were a USB drive? Can I somehow reformat this 2 tb SSD without buying more stuff? Any help will be appreciated! Bill