Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,
I am interested to use the "hard disk password" in my bios to encrypt the my hdd.
But I would ask, if my motherboard will broke, can I read the data stored in my hdd from an another computer?
I would avoid to lose everything.
thanks

A HD-password is stored on the HD itself.
As long as you remember the HD-password, you should be able to read/write the HD in most other laptops.

RealBlackStuff wrote:A HD-password is stored on the HD itself.
As long as you remember the HD-password, you should be able to read/write the HD in most other laptops.

thanks for the answer. the problem is that I don't know how is encrypted the disk and if my motherboard will broke I don't know how can read those data also if I know the password, can you understand what I mean?

thinkys wrote: I would avoid to lose everything.

The only way is regular backup on another device because your HDD may crash anytime. As for the disk SATA password you should be able to access the disk on any machine that have BIOS support for that.

Puppy wrote:

thinkys wrote: I would avoid to lose everything.

The only way is regular backup on another device because your HDD may crash anytime. As for the disk SATA password you should be able to access the disk on any machine that have BIOS support for that.

For some reason, this has not always been this way, at least with some of my hard disks. Just today I swapped two HDDs with passwords between virtually identical T61s (only difference was T9500 vs T7700 cpu). Only one of disks (hitachi) unlocked fine, while the other (WD) kept denying a correct password. Swapped the drive back to the original machine that the password was created on, and it accepts the password. I did a similar swap with my W530 and Toughbook drives a few months ago (hitachi and samsung), both with the same password on them, and they both refused the correct password.

Seems like there may be other factors that influence whether or not the drive will unlock, once the password is set. Hopefully your HDD will unlock fine.

that happened to you was exactly the my fear! For this I think is not very sure use this encryption at the moment.

For most modern Thinkpads, there's a BIOS option which enables a passphrase to be used. If you are having problems unlocking/reading a password protected drive that has been moved from an "old" Thinkpad system, you should make sure that this option is set the same on the "new" system.

rkawakami wrote:For most modern Thinkpads, there's a BIOS option which enables a passphrase to be used. If you are having problems unlocking/reading a password protected drive that has been moved from an "old" Thinkpad system, you should make sure that this option is set the same on the "new" system.

the problem that could appear (as far I understood) is also when you change hdd between similar thinkpad.