A friend thinks the solution to this is to purchase another logic board, because he thinks that PW is stored in the BIOS of the board. My 1st go-round with cracking an encrypted drive taught me that the password is stored in a hidden sector of the HD platters. So I'm posting this to find out if he's right, and that replacing the logic board will make the data on the HD available. He's already purchased the logic board.

If that is going to fail, then what is the next step? Thanks in advance.

Hi,

first of all correct your subject.. GSXN is TOSHIBA not Samsung..

Secondly, he will fail.

Th pw is not on the PCB.

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Also, what do you mean by "encrypted"?

Do you actually mean encrypted (I.e. With encryption software such as Truecrypt) or just an ATA password? An ATA password does not encrypt, just denies access.

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Sorry. I'm posting on behalf of someone else that does not have a hddguru account, so that is the reason for my stupidity. When he said "password protected" I assumed it was encrypted. For some reason I want to think that some laptops have built-in HD encryption options? At this point I don't know if it's truly encrypted or if it only has a password block on it. I assume that neither of these conditions can be solved by replacing the logic board.

Yes, that's right. Neither have anything to do with the PCB whatsoever, in fact another PCB wouldn't even work with the drive, 100% guaranteed. Even the serial number of the drive is programmed into the "ROM" on the PCB on Toshibas.

If he's genuinely interested in getting the data, it shouldn't be an expensive job for pro with right equipment, but of course he'll need proof of ownership.

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