Hard drive locked

f0x. · #1 11-12-09, 09:01 AM

Ok boys and girls, i have found my self a 160 gig hard drive, it asks for a pw at bios, not after, and it can be seen by acryonis, but not imaged or edited.

Baseline question, is there a way to remove this kind of encryption.

Any help appreciated

Rastalovich · #2 11-12-09, 09:03 AM

Any idea what the encryption method is ?

And what is the filesystem ?

f0x. · #3 11-12-09, 09:32 AM

Seems to be NFTS, its puzzling me that it asks for a password so early on though... is there any tools that can completely remove the file system and encryption off a hard drive, also, it cant be formatted in windows setup :P

Rastalovich · #4 11-12-09, 10:58 AM

Ah ok, with ntfs I'm not aware of a method that will lock the drive down once it's outside of it's conditions.

What I mean is, if u can physically take the drive out and introduce it as a slave to an existing pc, u may have a better chance. Passwords from that point can ~usually~ be bypassed by taking ownership, at administrator level if necessary.

Even whilst in this slave state, u can image it normally. But if u then try introducing an imaged drive back in place of the original, it may complain as the drive id may be part of the process.

I'm assuming here that it's either in a laptop or external drive housing that has it's own bios/section that dictates access rights.

f0x. · #5 11-12-09, 12:36 PM

You dont get what i mean though, this thing even when in the pc cannot be accessed. Period. i can fire it into a external, where i can see it but can do nothing with it. Any suggestions?

Rastalovich · #6 11-12-09, 12:48 PM

Sounds strange to me.

If it's the case that ur not interested in the data, but would like to format it to use it as a new drive after the fact, I can understand Windows not allow u. However, there should be plenty of dos based tools that would allow even a low level format of the drive (as it wouldn't understand what ntfs is without being told), even something as simple as PartitionMagic from boot allowing u to change it from ntfs to fat32 just to allow u to mess with it after in Windows if u wanted.

Be an idea to hunt down Hirens Boot CD or something and see what will allow u to do things with it and get it so as u can use it.

As to breaking the encryption in terms of data recovery, without the pass ur probably screwed if it's something like HP/Dell's drive encryption tech. It'd likely take Sony/nVidia/IBM months to break it.