Accessing encrypted windows hard drive with live CD
 

Hello,

A friend of mine has a windows laptop that will not boot. He needs to get files off of it and I said you could do that with a Linux live CD. However, I tried it and it didn't mount the hard drive automatically. My feeble attempts at mounting it proved fruitless. My friend then mentioned.. "Does it matter if the drive is encrypted?" I'm not an expert, but I think it does.

Is there a way I can access that drive to get his files off? The encryption software still works. It asks for a password and un-encrypts it at boot up. However, the boot process fails when windows tries to boot up. The name of the encryption software he is using is called Encryption Plus, if that helps.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you...

furry

Did you try booting into Windows Safe mode (hold down F8 after you enter the encryption password).

I doubt that it unencrypts the entire drive. We use Pointsec at work and there is a daemon that runs to encrypt, decrypt during any read/writes to the hard drive. The initial password only allows the boot sector to be decrypted, then starts the daemon to allow any other read/writes to be encrypted.

The entire purpose of encrypting a drive is so that no one can access the data on it except the authorized user..

You will NOT be able to copy files from it using a live CD. you will need to fix the windows OS so it boots property and hopefully retains the information about the users rights and encryption keys..


Windows Bitlocker Encryption (Vista)

Data protection and recovery using EFS in Windows XP

Encrypting File system in Windows XP and 2003

Best of luck to your friend..

Might want to recommend a secure backup solution to him as well...