WD HDD locked drive, trying to get back into pc repair, 1st client lol

Below Ambient

Below Ambient

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 5, 2001
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So after a long time of not caring to fix PCs anymore I picked up a customer who dropped his laptop and its got a password protected drive in it with all his family pictures... im completely lost ive tried everything but this program called "dfl wdii hdd repair tool" but its on lockdown as well as a number of others... I know if I was a good linux guy i could probably have had this finished a long tiem ago, but im not...

Im hoping the forum can help me out since I trying to get establish doing repair again, but damn this is a bit more than I thought I would end up doing getting back into it...

So far Ive tried to get teh drive to get recognized in disc manager, ive tried all the softwares, acornis, wondershare, etc... they all try and fail within 1% of the drive scan or cant see the drive becasue its password protected... even booting up my own system which its connected to my BIOS brings up the password prompt for the drive.. I think ive figured out its high security, I got that far using a program called victoria...

help me out wizards
 
Below Ambient said:
So after a long time of not caring to fix PCs anymore I picked up a customer who dropped his laptop and its got a password protected drive in it with all his family pictures... im completely lost ive tried everything but this program called "dfl wdii hdd repair tool" but its on lockdown as well as a number of others... I know if I was a good linux guy i could probably have had this finished a long tiem ago, but im not...

Im hoping the forum can help me out since I trying to get establish doing repair again, but damn this is a bit more than I thought I would end up doing getting back into it...

So far Ive tried to get teh drive to get recognized in disc manager, ive tried all the softwares, acornis, wondershare, etc... they all try and fail within 1% of the drive scan or cant see the drive becasue its password protected... even booting up my own system which its connected to my BIOS brings up the password prompt for the drive.. I think ive figured out its high security, I got that far using a program called victoria...

help me out wizards
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Try this program. https://www.passfab.com/products/windows-password-recovery.html

Not that I'm any kind of wizard. :rolleyes:
 
Is it an SSD or a spinner? What OS (OSX/Windows?) Did they have drive encryption turned on in the OS (Bitlocker/FileVault?) ATA password? Third party encryption?
 
Below Ambient said:
i think its windows 11 on a sata spinner
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If it is Windows 11 and a commercially available laptop it likely has BitLocker enabled by default. If it is and you don't have the password or the recovery key you are basically SOL. You can try something like BitCracker or Elcomsoft distributed key recovery but depending on how much horesepower you have (computing wise) to throw at the problem the odds are not in your favor. I wish I had better news.
 
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If you don't have that key or can't recover it, it has done its job protecting data. Not sure you will be able to recover unless you can get this computer to properly boot up.
 
the requirement to disable the HDD password is to secure erase the drive normally or enter the correct password to turn it off

or if its a bitlocker hardware password then gets more complicated (using SED self encrypting drive then without the TPM chip and same laptop or backup Bitlocker key (not sure if that's enough when hardware encryption is been used) your data is now safe from been stolen or been accessible
 
auntjemima said:
A lot of people have no idea what bitlocker is and don't pay any attention to the prompts and warnings and provided passkey. People are dumb.
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True enough, you'd just think a little extra care and attention would be applied when dealing with something potentially irreplaceable. But, reference 'people are dumb', I suppose.
 
kurdt said:
True enough, you'd just think a little extra care and attention would be applied when dealing with something potentially irreplaceable. But, reference 'people are dumb', I suppose.
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I think the ease at which people can take photos now actually cause people to be careless.

Used to be a photo album of nearly every picture you took because you had to actively get them developed. Now? People take 10-20-100 pictures a day and because of that they lose their value until they are looking for that one picture years later and cannot remember what phone or even timeframe to look at.

Lazy and dumb.
 
auntjemima said:
I think the ease at which people can take photos now actually cause people to be careless.

Used to be a photo album of nearly every picture you took because you had to actively get them developed. Now? People take 10-20-100 pictures a day and because of that they lose their value until they are looking for that one picture years later and cannot remember what phone or even timeframe to look at.

Lazy and dumb.
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Ha, yeah... I remember when I first started switching from film to digital cameras, and the revelation of, "I can take as many pictures as I want!" Well, it seemed like it at the time, anyway -- despite memory card sizes that are laughable today. Now, you don't even give a second thought to burning 5 or 10 shots on a single picture just to 'be sure'. That would've been unthinkable for most people using film, outside of professional photographers, heh.

Either way, very true... in the days of film, you actually had to think about whether a photo was even worth taking, and now it's not even a consideration.
 
Ahhh the mumber of times I've heard "Bitlocker??? What's that?"

Default encryption for dummies, another great idea from Microshaft.

It might be linked however, if they have a MS account. Worth a login and look if they have one. Otherwise its a nice simple rebuild and hand it back.

Sometimes it works out better when you havent got to deep dive for data.
 
kurdt said:
True enough, you'd just think a little extra care and attention would be applied when dealing with something potentially irreplaceable. But, reference 'people are dumb', I suppose.
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if all you're use to doing is hitting accept and ok without reading anything like 99.9% of people are then they don't know what they don't know. but yeah if i remember correctly you can access the bitlocker key through the microsoft account that was tied to that system.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
if all you're use to doing is hitting accept and ok without reading anything like 99.9% of people are then they don't know what they don't know. but yeah if i remember correctly you can access the bitlocker key through the microsoft account that was tied to that system.
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I do think this is possible. Then you can use the key to unlock the drive.
 
Possibly stolen clunker, as client should have pw for his own family photos.
 
Gomar said:
Possibly stolen clunker, as client should have pw for his own family photos.
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Oh you'd be surprised. I have had customers that have no idea they took out a MS Office subscription or what their email password is.

Spent an hour going through the login password to a laptop with a boomer customer once. They really dont have a clue. Back in the day when MS started asking for MS accounts to login to the PC I used to have to ask for the password to be told "I can't give you the password as it's my email password!"

"Well if you want me to fix it..."
 
daglesj said:
Oh you'd be surprised. I have had customers that have no idea they took out a MS Office subscription or what their email password is.

Spent an hour going through the login password to a laptop with a boomer customer once. They really dont have a clue. Back in the day when MS started asking for MS accounts to login to the PC I used to have to ask for the password to be told "I can't give you the password as it's my email password!"

"Well if you want me to fix it..."
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Boomer here: 1st PC 64K of mem expandable to 128K. 1st laptop Military 20lb Otrona model with a 2 inch screen that you could bowl with and it still worked. Learned before that on punch cards, sorry you must have run into one of those that was "Mondo" instead of "Colleige" in high school.
 
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