Re: HDD Password.

I hate to pour cold water on this, however, I have had experience with
password locked hard drives on IBM. About two years ago I came across
an IBM laptop with a drive lock password - I was not able to find any
method to even access the drive without the password. Even the simplest
touch would demand a password and I could not find any method break the
password - though I only spent a couple of days trying to gain access.
Now if you are talking about MS encryption (I have not seen any case of
that being applied to a whole drive). Though in the newest versions of
MS do a good job of encrypting a folder and I suppose that you could
have a folder for the whole drive - except the MBR. If this is the case
and if the person did not set up a recovery agent and has access to it -
you might as well reformat the drive as without access to the key he
will not be able to unscramble the data. This is a classic case of
Microsoft saying we can do this - but not asking what will be the outcome.

In these two cases I am not even sure that professional data recovery
firms could do any good.

roger

jgribbin@alaska.net wrote:
> If its that 'platter lock' thing IBM uses on their laptops, IBM says you have to throw away the drive.
> You might try Ontrack, the data recovery outfit. I read somewhere that they have, or have access to, a hardware pod of some sort that will let them tranfer the drive image to another drive while at the same time removing the lock.
>
> This would let them recover the data on the drive, but the old physical drive itself is usless as they can't remove or read that lock. Apperantly they can remove the lock in the image data stream somehow.
>
> Jim Gribbin
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: levi <levi@akgeeks.com>
> Date: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 3:27 pm
> Subject: HDD Password.
>
>
>> We have A computer in our shop that is in for data recovery,
>> because they
>> forgot the password for thier harddrive. Our issue is, we can't
>> find a way
>> around this without frying the data. We can't run fdisk, cfdisk,
>> fixmbr...or anything else that we can think of, under Linux or
>> Windows. I thought
>> perhaps changing the drive pe to "007" (ntfs) in cfdisk, or fixing
>> the MBR
>> would work, but we cant access the drive, on the local machine or
>> by =
>> pulling
>> it and slaving it onto a workbench computer... I'm at a total
>> loss, and =
>> was
>> hoping perhaps someone had experience with this. Any input would be
>> appreciated...
>> Thank You,
>> Levi
>>
>>
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>
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Received on Wed Aug 23 23:48:33 2006