Service Forum

[Roger]

I had been searching for a number of years for a solution to unlock hard drives. Over the years I have acquired a large number of units that have been put aside due to unknown passwords.

I'd long ago written these units off as being beyond economical repair and did not expect to be able to remove the passwords and put them back into use.

Indeed, with it now costing no more than £30 for a new 40GB hard drive, I was close to dumping these units.

I bought last week a copy of the EraseOn software from Allservice. For anybody who's not yet convinced, the software does the trick and I've so far unlocked four hard drives of varying sizes from different manufactures.

These range from an old 6.4GB TravelStar to a newer 40GB Fujtsu unit.

The software runs under XP and it is quite straightforward to use.

I guess this is just a post to re-assure other potential customers that this software does work and does exactly what it's meant to do! I had all but written these drives off, so for a $145 investment I can't argue.

My only adverse comment is that the literature suggests that it will prompt you before the drive is wiped. In my instance, no prompting occured and the password was displayed in plaintext before the drive was wiped without any prompting. Perhaps there are some command line switches that I need to research, but regardless of this, I now have drives which are unlocked and operational alebeit without data.

So if you're running a test hard drive through this with a known password, make sure it doesn't contain any data you want (mine didn't!)!

The system is currently brute force cracking a 20GB TravelStar drive. It has been operational for in excess of two days now for up to five characters. How long should I expect a five character brute force attack to take before all possible combinations are exhausted?

What should I be doing to have EraseOn display the password only without data wiping?

An excellent product! Keep up the good work!

Best Wishes

[victor]

Hi Roger,

Thanks very much for your input.

The scan time depends only on the drive speed. Is not a matter of data access speed but of command process speed. If the drive acknowledges faster the scan is quicker.
Upon our tests, the quickest drives so far were the Travelstars and the best of all are the DK series. A dictionary like the brute5only was processed in no more than 4-5 hours, the brute4 in only 7 minutes.
On the other hand, the Toshibas seems to be the slowest. Of course it depends on the drive firmware and, of course, new drives are quiker than the old ones.
I pland to insert a pause function with statistics detail in the next release.

Regarding the erase function, this can be aborted only using a special reset cable or manually by removing the HD power supply (better to reboot the PC). The software send Erase commands all the time, when the command is accepted, it prompts the password but the erase process starts at once.