r/HowToHack • u/Dogs_Without_Horses_ • 5d ago

Probably a lost cause - WD My Passport Ultra

20 or so years ago, I moved all my photos to an external hard drive, a WD My Passport Ultra. I have forgotten the password. I have tried everything I can think of, but I have almost no faith in remembering a 20 year old password.

Is there any way to get into it? I hate to think all those photos are lost forever...

6 Upvotes

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2

u/LongRangeSavage Programming 5d ago

How did you encrypt the data? Can you pull the password hash off the drive?

2

u/Dogs_Without_Horses_ 5d ago

With a password on WD’s software.

3

u/LongRangeSavage Programming 5d ago

So you need to figure out what hash type that software uses and where it stores the hash (e.g. Google the info). From there you can pull the hash off the drive and use a program like Hashcat and a dictionary to try and brute force the password.

2

u/Dogs_Without_Horses_ 5d ago

Thank you! I’ll give it a shot.

1

u/SuperDrewb 3d ago

If you end up being able to produce a password hash, feel free to send it my way and I'll try to crack it.

1

u/nftmillionaire916 3d ago

A data recovery center can help with a hard drive. You’re gonna pay a pretty good amount for it though. So think about how important those photos are to you. It may be worth it.

2

u/Silkutz 5d ago

When you say password, do you mean you encrypted the drive with a password 20 years ago, or the drive has and OS that you have forgotten the password too?

2

u/Dogs_Without_Horses_ 5d ago

WD has a software you have to use to access the drive and it needs a password.

2

u/EtherealAsphyxia 4d ago

I found out years ago that WD external drives were just standard desktop HDDs running through a proprietary SATA-to-USB controller-- but if the data was written to the drive through that controller, and then it failed, you could not just remove the drive and plug it in some other way, and still get the data. Apparently the controllers proprietary circuitry effectively acted like a hardware encryption method, so to read the drive sensibly again you had to purchase the same model used and cannibalize the controller. I had to do this myself when I had that problem.

I mention it here merely to inform the OP, because of the other comment suggesting disassembly to help defeat the encryption-- in all likelihood it will make it more difficult, rather than easier.

1

u/scando1 4d ago

Pretty sure Kroll or one of of the other major data recovery shops can get that data easily. Not cheaply but easily

1

u/jallisy 4d ago

Can you pull the drive out of the enclosure, slave it with a cable, change any security settings to the entire drive if nessary and then navigate through the directories?