Hi everybody!
This is my first post and I'm going to ask something that I've understood is considered borderline, I hope you can answer me by forum rules.
So, here's the fact. A friend of mine asked me to buy him a PATA (just to tell you how old it is) HDD external enclosure because he had an old broken Lenovo Thinkpad and he wanted to remove the HDD and use it as an external drive. What he didn't remember is that he encrypted the drive with Lenovo's FDE BIOS feature and now that drive is inaccessible.
I tried to wipe the MBR, write zeroes with dd and similar, but realised only later that FDE writes the encryption key in the firmware and so any attempt is useless.
Contrary to other previous questions (that's why I think this post is legit), he remembers the HDD password, so that's not a problem. The problem here is finding a way to have this password asked so that he can access the drive and possibly remove the encryption key.
If I've well understood, it is only possible to remove the key from the BIOS of the original PC (or even a different PC of the same line of models). Unfortunately, his own PC is broken and we don't have access to any other Thinkpad to put the HDD into, or any other laptop with a PATA port for what matters.
So, the question is: is there any way (a software or something) that lets you handle this FDE key is some way, e.g. delete it, provided that you have to insert the current password first? Can it be done from the external HDD enclosure (any OS is fine, we have Windows, Linux, Mac)? If not, I have a desktop computer with PATA ports. If I connect the HDD to one of them and boot from it, is there a way to do what I'm asking?
Thanks in advance to everybody.
This is my first post and I'm going to ask something that I've understood is considered borderline, I hope you can answer me by forum rules.
So, here's the fact. A friend of mine asked me to buy him a PATA (just to tell you how old it is) HDD external enclosure because he had an old broken Lenovo Thinkpad and he wanted to remove the HDD and use it as an external drive. What he didn't remember is that he encrypted the drive with Lenovo's FDE BIOS feature and now that drive is inaccessible.
I tried to wipe the MBR, write zeroes with dd and similar, but realised only later that FDE writes the encryption key in the firmware and so any attempt is useless.
Contrary to other previous questions (that's why I think this post is legit), he remembers the HDD password, so that's not a problem. The problem here is finding a way to have this password asked so that he can access the drive and possibly remove the encryption key.
If I've well understood, it is only possible to remove the key from the BIOS of the original PC (or even a different PC of the same line of models). Unfortunately, his own PC is broken and we don't have access to any other Thinkpad to put the HDD into, or any other laptop with a PATA port for what matters.
So, the question is: is there any way (a software or something) that lets you handle this FDE key is some way, e.g. delete it, provided that you have to insert the current password first? Can it be done from the external HDD enclosure (any OS is fine, we have Windows, Linux, Mac)? If not, I have a desktop computer with PATA ports. If I connect the HDD to one of them and boot from it, is there a way to do what I'm asking?
Thanks in advance to everybody.
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