Other External products

[jpeterman]

 I've got a Maxtor BlackArmor 2.5" 320GB drive that a user knocked off his desk. Now the mini USB port on the back of the drive is missing the plastic piece that protects/guides the copper contacts and it can't connect using USB. I took the drive out of the case and connected a SATA to USB adapter but Windows XP can't read the drive. XP see's it as a USB mass storage device and when you go into Drive Manager it wants to initialize and convert the drive. I don't want to do that because the drive has important and sensitive data on it. I am waiting for the user to bring over his laptop so we can test it on the original computer.

My question is, does the BA drive require the original Maxtor circuit board interface that came out of the BA drive case to encrypt/decrypt the drive, or should the method I'm currently using still work? I believe the BA drive uses software for encryption (similar to encrypted USB flash drives), but I don't have any experience with these BA drives.

Thanks!

[jpeterman]

Nevermind, I was able to answer my own question. Yes, the circuitboard included with the BlackArmor drive is required in order to access the drive. Apparently there is a chip (flash memory?) that is required to access the unencrypted partition so you can run the BA software to access the secure partition or drive. Now I just need to come up with a way to hard wire the USB connection that's broken to access the information long enough to remove it from the drive.

[Kirstzo]

Came across your post and I have the exact same problem.  Did you ever get it sorted out?