Think of your hard disk as a room containing all the files on your hard drive. Should You Set a Hard Disk Password? No, Just Use Encryption You can’t simply connect it as an external drive and unlock it if your computer fails and you need to recover the files. Some hard disk password features, such as HP’s DriveLock, only work if the drive is inside the computer. If you remove a locked hard drive, it may be more difficult to access.
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If you use encryption, you can remove the hard drive from your computer, connect it to another computer, and unlock it using the same encryption software and secret code. Even if you forget your password to an encrypted drive, you can simply wipe the drive and start over. Computer manufacturers won’t help you make it usable again. Let’s say you forget a hard disk password - the drive’s hardware is now “ bricked” and unusable until you use specialized data forensics software.
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RELATED: How to Secure Your Computer With a BIOS or UEFI PasswordĪ hard disk password can actually be more inconvenient than encryption. The drive’s firmware settings area could be modified to set the “password on” flag to “password off.” In an extreme case, the drive could be opened up, its platters removed, and inserted into another drive without a password set.Ī hard disk password also won’t help if your computer is taken while asleep, as the drive will only prompt you at boot. Some drives store the password unencrypted in their firmware, and this unencrypted password can simply be read from a firmware. For example, there are a number of data forensics programs that promise they can remove hard disk passwords. Using a hard disk password does help protect your files, unlike an operating system password or BIOS password.Ī hard disk password has some big weaknesses. The hard disk password is stored in the disk drive’s firmware itself. The downside is that when the HD eventually malfunctions it will be harder or even impossible to retrieve any files from it.Unlike BIOS and operating system passwords, a hard disk password protects your data even if someone opens up your computer and removes the hard disk. In this time of rising identity theft, protecting your personal data by locking your hard disk with a password is indeed a good idea. The only way of retrieving any files from a password protected hard disk without knowing the password is to send it to a data recovery company for unlocking, but not all data recovery companies could or would unlock a password protected HD.
Even swapping the controller of the password-protected hard disk with exactly the same controller from an unprotected HD will not remove the protection on most disks, as the password (together with most of the firmware) is also stored on the hard disk itself. The hard disk manufacturers are unable to unlock a password protected hard disk, as there aren’t any “secret” master passwords build into the firmware. And not only on your computer, but on any computer.Ī lot of newer laptops will set the HD password together with the BIOS password, completely locking all the hardware. Setting this password will make the hard disk completely unusable to anyone that doesn’t know it. This password is usually stored both in a chip on the HD controller (the printed circuit board on the hard disk) and on the hard disk itself in a special hidden sector. It is not a very well known fact, but all hard disks have a very strong hardware password capability build in.
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