HD-PZ500U3B disk failure - decryption

[tmorant]

Buffalo MiniStation Extreme USB 3.0 Portable HDD HD-PZ500U3B

As above, this device has failed on me and I did not have a very recent backup.  I had enabled the 'encryption' feature of this product.

The interesting thing is that the data recovery company advises me that all data is intact and can be restored to a new disk.  More interestingly, the company advises me that the disk is in fact not encrypted but rather, the filesystem is locked using a utility stored on one of the sectors - called password.exe.

Buffalo telephone support have been very unsupportive in questions around data recovery.

My question:

Can the data be copied to a second Buffalo Ministation, without encryption turned on, and then retrieved by enabling 'encryption' using the same key.

Alternatively, the data recovery specialists have worked with Buffalo company before and advise there should be a software utility to allow access to the  data directly, perhaps Buffalo can provide a copy.  This would mean there should be a way, using the same password key, to unlock the filesystem.


Thanks ! Tony

[tmorant]

I have since had the entire data/filesystem on the broken Ministation recovered to a new drive.

1
I tried inserting the new drive into a new Ministation enclosure and connecting it to the new controller, the password request dialog box appeared correctly, and although the password was successfully accepted, I was unable to see my data partition.

2
I then tried attaching the new drive to the original controller and, as per original fault, there was a quick green flash and click from the controller and nothing else happened -not even a prompt for the password.

3
I then tried attaching the old 'broken drive' to the new controller, and as it should, the password prompt occurred and I entered the original password.

Like 1 above, the password was accepted and the logical ISO CD drive disappears, but I cannot see a proper partition.

Although this is disappointing, I now see that actually the drive was not the part which failed, it was the Buffalo controller which has failed. Buffalo phone support were /very/ quick to put the fault down to the drive failing - not their own hardware.

Please can someone advise me on what the implications are when using an internal MiniStation HDD with the controller on a different/new MiniStation which has already had set, the same password as was originally used on the first controller.

When I mount the recovered drive inWindows on its own or within the MiniStation, Windows advises me that there are no partitions and that I must create one and format the drive.

thanks !

[Misha]

Resurrecting an old post because I had the same problem and recovered all the encrypted files.

Buffalo Portable HD PF-320U2-WH, a Japanese unit with Securelock software and encryption enabled. Belongs to a friend who knocked the drive off his desk during a write operation. All his family photos, no other backups.

Installed Securelock on an XP machine as nothing worked under Win 7 (2009 product). When connecting the damaged drive I was prompted for the password, the drive was recognised but there was no partition and it looked like the only way forward was formatting the drive. I called Buffalo Japan and they said that was the case, sorry, you've lost your data, reformat the drive to continue using it. (As an aside I did try this later but it failed, I just got an error message).

Instead I cloned the drive to a new, larger drive using ddrescue on the Knoppix 7.2 boot DVD. There appeared to be many bad sectors on the drive and the copying process took more than a week. ddrescue halted and closed down many times over the course of the recovery. After the cloning process was done I dropped the new bigger drive into the Buffalo enclosure and as with the original poster... nothing.

The hard drive in the Buffalo unit was a Western Digital Scorpion Blue 320Gb unit. I bought an identical drive secondhand (same year, MDL, LBA, slightly different DCM) that I found on eBay. Formatted that under Securelock using the identical password used for the damaged drive. So now I had a new 500Gb drive in a USB caddy with all the cloned data (which I thought was encrypted, maybe not) and a healthy, empty Buffalo USB drive, password protected and encrypted.

Backed up the partition table on the empty Buffalo drive using sfdisk, this time the system was booted using the SystemRescueCD live cd. Next, ddrescue again to clone the 500Gb drive with the rescued data to the empty 320Gb Buffalo drive. ddrescue didn't baulk at the drive sizes. Cloning took about 4.5 hours, then ddrescue just stopped with a message saying it had run out of space.

I restarted Windows XP and was prompted for the Securelock password, gained access to the Buffalo drive and all the data was there to be read. Surprisingly all the partition information must have been intact so I didn't have to restore that from my backup. It seems the drive itself was the failure. The partition table was there but the drive couldn't read it. The Buffalo controller was functioning normally.

Hope this gives someone in the same situation a way forward. It may be possible to recover your encrypted files on a failed drive.