How to open my external hard drive, which is locked by password.exe file in ubuntu?

Question

i recently installed ubuntu and am learning a lot of new things. I have an external hard drive (HD-PZU3 ministation) and it is password protected. Before I can navigate the drive, I have to run the password.exe file, where I enter my password.

Before using ubuntu, it was very simple for me to open it up in windows but now I cannot access my data. I looked online and found out that wine can be used to run exe files. I installed wine, and when I run the password.exe file, I get this error: " No drive requiring authentication is available".

I tried to change permissions of the password.exe file, but a pop up message would appear stating: "Permissions could not be changed".

I would really appreciate the help.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It seems your external drive is 'encrypted' with some proprietary software, and since we don't know what type of encryption it uses, it is difficult to decode without using the original software.

Wine will indeed run your software, but it has no idea about the external device (it has no access directly to devices in Linux, it uses filesystem access).

To solve your problem you could either:

1. Install Windows in a Virtual machine on Ubuntu. You could use Virtmanager or VirtualBox. Either of these will let you configure your USB device as being attached to the virtual machine. Unfortunately, that means going through the trouble of installing Windows

2. If you have access to a Windows machine, you could run the software on there to unlock the drive.

Sadly, whichever way you do it, you will have to copy the files off the drive, reformat it and copy them back on if you want to use it natively with Linux, unless anyone else happens to know exactly what method this particular software uses to encrypt the files