External Hard Drive password Help

crewe

Hi

I have a freind who has passed away and his widow has asked me to help.

My friend has a Toshiba external USB hard drive which has a password protection on it. All their wedding photos are stored on it.

Is there some software I can use to find the password, or can you recommend somewhere that I can get it unlocked.

Any help welcome.

fwor

The following blog post suggests that there isn't a simple solution, and that it's not purely implemented in software:

http://dschneller.blogspot.com/2007/04/something-to-know-about-toshiba.html

IMO probably the only route to take is to contact Toshiba and explain the circumstances and see if they can help, as - if the above is correct - attempts to circumvent the password may lose all of your friend's data.

cherry_snaps

Hi,

Take a backup of the drive using a drive image solution, such as norton ghost, or acronis....

Data recovery firms should be able to help, but if it is heavily encrypted you do not have much hope.

Andy

fwor

cherry_snaps wrote: »

Take a backup of the drive using a drive image solution, such as norton ghost, or acronis....

If it were encrypted with something like Truecrypt or other well-known encryption software I'd agree.

But if the blogger in the link is correct - and he seems to know what he's talking about - then there is hardware & firmware intervening between the PC and the drive itself which makes the first partition on the drive appear to be a CD-ROM drive.

Hence you've no idea how much of the drive is being hidden from you, and no idea what encryption is being applied. It could be something proprietary and trivial, or it could be AES with a 256 bit key, or any of dozens of other possible algorithms.

If the drive is taken out of the caddy, it will probably not appear to be formatted in any known, valid, recoverable way.

fwor

Having looked at this a bit more, I think my last post is wrong.

It seems you can create a partition that looks like a CD without the need for extra hardware/firmware, and that the technique is used on SanDisk U3 (and probably other) USB pendrives, so that software on the imitation CD can be auto-run.

So perhaps not as problematic as it at first appeared, but you still don't know what algorithm they've used to encrypt the data partition. If Toshiba were to tell you that you might stand a chance of getting your data back - though if they've used AES with a 256 bit key, don't expect to see it any time soon...

crewe

Not looking good, thanks for the replies.

I have emailed Toshiba support and will keep you updated.

Cheers