I forgot the password for my USB thumbdrive!

June 3, 2006 7:42 AM

Is there anyway I can still access the files on it? If that's not possible, can the drive be still made usable, by reformatting it in some fashion? Or will I just have to get a new one and dumb this one into the garbage can?
posted by sk381 to computers & internet (7 comments total)

What exactly happened to it?
posted by meta87 at 7:51 AM on June 3, 2006

Oh I get it, sorry didn't read the title.
posted by meta87 at 7:51 AM on June 3, 2006

What type of drive? What operating system are you using? What sort of software were you using to encrypt/protect the drive?
posted by unixrat at 7:55 AM on June 3, 2006

It's just a regular USB flash drive.. the generic kind, given away by companies as swag and I used the built in password protection software that came with it. I'm using Win XP Home edition. Trying to format using windows's format command gives an error that says that the disk is write protected.

(Sorry for omitting this information from the original question)
posted by sk381 at 8:17 AM on June 3, 2006

Intead of formatting it, can you repartition it? That may allow you to blow out the secure partition.
posted by willnot at 9:52 AM on June 3, 2006

Using Partition Magic 8.0 is not helpful as the usb drive is not listed as a valid drive in the options. Is there a better partitioning software (free/shareware) that I could use?
posted by sk381 at 10:25 AM on June 3, 2006

I have recovered data on an un-bootable corrupted hard drive by booting the PC with a "Live" Linux Boot CD from Knoppix. Then reading/copying the files I needed to another drive. The pain in this is you have to create the bootable Knoppix (Linux) CD.
http://www.knoppix.org/

Another option is to try a free download program to try and find the password, I just found this doing a quick google search. I've never used this one.
http://3d2f.com/programs/17-333-zip-password-recovery-download.shtml
posted by BillsR100 at 8:08 PM on June 3, 2006