Recover Data from an Encrypted Hard Drive

Whatever tool you used to encrypt your hard drive doesn’t care whether your intentions are good or bad. If you don’t have the password, you don’t get your data. Period.

Even more frustrating is when you have all your necessary decryption credentials, but when you unlock your drive, nothing comes up.

Getting locked out of your data for not remembering the password is rough. Getting locked out of your data even when you have your encryption credentials because suddenly everything else won’t work is maddening.

Maybe your drive doesn’t show up or gives a boot error. Maybe the data is visible, but you can’t open any files. Or maybe your drive is making unusual noises and won’t show you anything. Luckily for you, when your encrypted hard drive has failed, Gillware’s encrypted hard drive recovery services can help you.

We Recover Data from Encrypted Devices

Whether you have full-disk encryption like FileVault or file-level encryption like EFS, for all its uses, encryption adds an extra wrinkle to deal with in the event your external hard drive, desktop hard disk, or other storage devices suddenly stop working. When you can’t fix the problem on your own, and you can’t salvage any of your encrypted data with data recovery software, you can turn to us.

To access data from an encrypted storage device that has broken down, there are two factors you need on your side: the decryption credentials, and a team of data recovery experts to repair your storage device and recovery your encrypted files.

Our data recovery team can handle Mac data recovery, Windows data recovery, iPhone data recovery, and more. We have the tools to decrypt your lost data from most devices.

Gillware’s encrypted data recovery services include:

• Free consultations with our friendly advisors with instant price range estimates
• Free inbound shipping to our data recovery lab in Madison, WI
• Free in-lab evaluations by world-class data recovery specialists
• No upfront charges for encrypted hard drive recovery services
• Secure facilities to make sure your encrypted data stays safe and sound all the way through the recovery process
• Financially risk-free “No Data, No Charge” data recovery guarantee

Gillware has been salvaging data from failed storage devices since 2003, with over 100,000 cases successfully solved in our lab to date.

How We Recover Data from an Encrypted Hard Drive

You’re minding your own business, working on your own business at home. Your cat jumps on your desk and, as they do, carefully nudges the full-drive encrypted external drive you keep all your financial documents on off the edge. It hits the floor with a thud. You plug it back into your computer, hear some nasty clicks, and hastily unplug it. The external drive is toast. Can Gillware get your Quickbooks file back?

Yes, we can.

Recovering data from encrypted devices puts a little wrinkle into the normal data recovery process here in Gillware’s lab. Read on to learn more about how it works:

Let’s say you dropped your Smartware-encrypted Western Digital MyBook hard drive on the floor, it started clicking, and you sent it to Gillware. Here’s what happens next.

Recovering your encrypted external drive will be a little different from a normal dropped external hard drive recovery case. We still need to open up your hard drive in our data recovery lab and make repairs, just like any other hard drive failure case, then use our proprietary forensic imaging tools to scan and image the drive’s contents for further analysis.

But the difficulty comes in imaging the drive. We cannot decrypt your drive until it is imaged. This means we cannot immediately scan and target the file definitions or used area of the drive like we usually do. We also can’t immediately target your most critical data first. Our data recovery cleanroom engineers have to make as complete of an image of the drive as possible before we decrypt it, then run our scans to see what we’ve gotten.

Depending on the severity of the hard drive’s failure, it isn’t always possible to create a perfect image of a failed drive. And we can’t know where any of the blank spots are until after decryption.

Encrypted hard drive recovery also ties up more machine time than a normal HDD data recovery service. This is because the image we create has to be decrypted and cloned before we can show the client the results of our recovery efforts. Getting as perfect of a 100% read as possible may also require more work from our cleanroom engineers than a case in which we can read a smaller portion of a drive and get all of the user’s files.

Common Types of Full-Drive Encryption

Full-drive encryption is one of the more popular encryption methods. Our encrypted hard drive recovery services tend to involve full-drive encryption. Generally, full-drive encryption doesn’t encrypt the entire hard drive, despite its name. Some forms of full-drive encryption, such as FileVault 2, create a small 600-megabyte system partition that remains unencrypted. Others will leave the master boot record unencrypted. Our engineers can look at the MBR to see which form of encryption the drive has. Encrypted hard drive recovery generally follows the same process outlined above regardless of the type of full-drive encryption.

File-Based Encryption

Another form of encryption our engineers see is file-level encryption. Features like Microsoft’s EFS, Credant, or Apple’s built-in file encryption options allow files and entire folders to be encrypted, but not the entire volume. When drives with file-level encryption fail, our data recovery engineers can read and logically analyze their filesystems just like any other drive.

However, due to the encryption, it is more difficult to test critical files for functionality or assess the level of possible file corruption that has occurred.

Why Choose Gillware for Encrypted Hard Drive Data Recovery?

Gillware’s data recovery services for failed encrypted drives are financially risk-free. We charge no upfront costs and no evaluation fees. Inbound shipping is on our dime for any customers in the continental US. And if we cannot recover your critical data from your failed encrypted drive, you owe us nothing—period.

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Gillware is trusted, reviewed and certified

Gillware has the seal of approval from a number of different independent review organizations, including SOC 2 Type II audit status, so our customers can be sure they’re getting the best data recovery services possible. Contact us today for more information about how Gillware’s independently certified data recovery experts can help you decrypt and recover data from an encrypted hard disk.