• Re: Encrypted drive - computer failure - recovery?

    From Jaimie Vandenbergh@21:1/5 to David on Tue May 17 09:37:35 2022
    On 17 May 2022 at 10:26:40 BST, "David" <wibble@btinternet.com> wrote:

    Just helping someone with a dead laptop (apparently just won't power up).

    The plan is to extract the M.2 SSD and use an adapter to recover the
    contents to the new laptop.

    However I just wondered if the drive could be encrypted.
    Probably not, however....

    If you have a laptop or desktop where the drive is encrypted I am assuming that you rely on the motherboard to encrypt and decrypt.

    Depends. Modern Windows will handle the entire encrypt and key storage
    in software if needed. If the laptop has a TPM module, the key may be in
    there instead. There are at least three generations of Windows
    whole-drive encryption that work slightly differently.

    Older business laptops (early 2000s) had "tie this HDD to this mobo" in
    bios, but I've not seen that in a while - pre-m.2, anyway.

    In which case, if the motherboard fails is the data very secure? So secure you cannot recover it?

    Yes, that's absolutely the point after all.

    Most important: Does the user have a password or recovery key, or
    recovery file on a USB stick? If not, there's no point worrying about it
    - you won't get it decrypted anyway, if it is encrypted.

    Cheers - Jaimie
    --
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  • From David@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 17 09:26:40 2022
    Just helping someone with a dead laptop (apparently just won't power up).

    The plan is to extract the M.2 SSD and use an adapter to recover the
    contents to the new laptop.

    However I just wondered if the drive could be encrypted.
    Probably not, however....

    If you have a laptop or desktop where the drive is encrypted I am assuming
    that you rely on the motherboard to encrypt and decrypt.

    In which case, if the motherboard fails is the data very secure? So secure
    you cannot recover it?


    Cheers



    Dave R


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