Can I recover data from an encrypted drive?
Posted: 06 Jan 2014, 12:42
Hello, a cry for help from Hiroshima...
I have in hand a Buffalo 320Gb external USB hard drive, model HD-PF320U2, and I'm stuck. The drive is picked up as a healthy volume in Win XP, 7 and 8 but I can't assign a drive letter and my only right-click option in Disk Management is to delete the volume.
Testdisk can't find a partition and Photorec returns some 8~9Gb and larger image files, ie not valid files.
I used DDrescue to copy the data on the Buffalo drive to a new Seagate (500Gb) identifying some bad sectors on the Buffalo in the process. The Seagate wouldn't mount either.
After trying Testdisk, Photorec and DDRescue I learned of Buffalo's Securelock 256-bit encryption and also learned that the owner of the drive accessed the info on it with a password. So I'm assuming the data on the drive is encrypted, which is why Photorec cannot retrieve the photos on the drive.
Buffalo's telephone support tells me encryption is unique to each drive - not the model, but each single drive.
So I have a Buffalo hard drive with encrypted data and bad sectors which I guess equals a corrupt partition table. I also have the same data on a healthy drive that can never be read from that drive.
If the partition table on the Buffalo is not encrypted can I rebuild it somehow with Testdisk?
Or can I possible delete the volume on the Buffalo Drive, create a new partition and then restore the encrypted data from the Seagate?
Sorry, I'm clutching at straws. Any advice you can offer would be deeply, sincerely appreciated.
Michael
I have in hand a Buffalo 320Gb external USB hard drive, model HD-PF320U2, and I'm stuck. The drive is picked up as a healthy volume in Win XP, 7 and 8 but I can't assign a drive letter and my only right-click option in Disk Management is to delete the volume.
Testdisk can't find a partition and Photorec returns some 8~9Gb and larger image files, ie not valid files.
I used DDrescue to copy the data on the Buffalo drive to a new Seagate (500Gb) identifying some bad sectors on the Buffalo in the process. The Seagate wouldn't mount either.
After trying Testdisk, Photorec and DDRescue I learned of Buffalo's Securelock 256-bit encryption and also learned that the owner of the drive accessed the info on it with a password. So I'm assuming the data on the drive is encrypted, which is why Photorec cannot retrieve the photos on the drive.
Buffalo's telephone support tells me encryption is unique to each drive - not the model, but each single drive.
So I have a Buffalo hard drive with encrypted data and bad sectors which I guess equals a corrupt partition table. I also have the same data on a healthy drive that can never be read from that drive.
If the partition table on the Buffalo is not encrypted can I rebuild it somehow with Testdisk?
Or can I possible delete the volume on the Buffalo Drive, create a new partition and then restore the encrypted data from the Seagate?
Sorry, I'm clutching at straws. Any advice you can offer would be deeply, sincerely appreciated.
Michael