Inherited Dad's computer stuff

[the86d]

Yeah, try hooking up the drive as a slave drive to see if you can read anything on it. However, if you don't think you need anything off the drive but still want to make sure it isn't hacked by anyone else, then physically take it apart and remove the silver platters from the inside. Destroy as needed.

This is pretty quick, assuming you have torx that will fit. Be aware most platters I have seen recently are like a glass, so if you try to bend them, they shatter into happy-little-shards, and I mean LITTLE SHARDS... not bent metal platters of old.

The alternative is a single Linux command if you have never taken one apart and rubbed 99% isopropyl alcohol all over the platter(s) with your fingers (I have always assumed that this speeds over-oxidation and smears any fingerprints over the surface evenly, or a nail scraped back and forth along the platter surface on both sides repeatedly and the quickest I have found to boot to the cli is Slackware): dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd[x] bs=1M
"sd[x]" would usually be whatever port it is plugged into SATA port 1 would usually be /dev/sda, SATA port 2 would be /dev/sdb, etc. An "fdisk -l" will tell you what drives are detected.

Might be work researching:

https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=backtrack+kaspersky+encrypted+drive

Brute-force I assume would be quick on something local compared to remote/wireless data.
I personally have never done this on anything but a .pst file before, but where there is a will...

[thrillhouse700]

What is a good brute force program?

[the86d]

Knoppix will read and write to anything that I ever threw at it, NTFS included, but I don't encrypt drives... yet.

If you boot to a Linux Live CD/DVD distro, can you mount the drive and see what file will tell you? Just a thought.

Mount the drive
"file /mnt/sdb2/encryptedfile1.fahk" or something like that...

How big are the 2 files on the drive (booting to Knoppix CD/DVD, of course)?

Since Linux doesn't really care about NTFS permissions, and just does what you tell it, much of Windows automated security and Windows-crap is circumvented...