Access encrypted external drive

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Level 1

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Access encrypted external drive

Hello all , not sure if this is the correct community to post this into, the list did not mention anything with hard drives or encryption. a few weeks ago, my macbook pro broke, and I had used to to encrypt a 1.5TB external drive. Since I do not have a mac to use the external drive with, is there any way that I can access the information without another macbook, I used a friend's macbook air and I was able to access the drive the way I used to with my mac, is there a way the decryption can be taken off without deleting the encrypted data(in my understanding it cant be done). or is there any software that I can use to access the drive the way it is accessed in a macbook. Thank you for your time.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Feb 22, 2018 6:48 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

BobHarris

Level 9

56,807 points

Feb 23, 2018 7:57 AM in response to paulddrix

I see 2 issues here

1) decrypting the drive

2) reading the drive from a non-macOS operating system.

Decrypting can be done. You will need your Friend's Mac to do it

<http://osxdaily.com/2016/10/25/decrypt-external-drive-mac>

Reading a macOS formatted file system on a non-Mac requires additional software on the non-Mac. For Windows, there is Paragon HFS+ for Windows.

<HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software| Paragon Software>

There are most likely others.

If it is Linux system, chances are there is some open source packages that will read HFS+ file systems.

The other thing you might do is transfer the information to an exFAT formatted file system that should be readable by just about every other operating system. That is exFAT, not FAT, and not FAT32.

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Answer 2

paulddrix Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 22, 2018 8:27 PM in response to Eric Root

Yes, I now see how ambiguous my question is, to clarify, I do have a working computer, however this computer does not run Mac OS, therefore I cannot decrypt the drive because it is formatted in a way that is not understood by this operating system, so is there any way that I can run a decryption of the drive from another operating system. Thank you for your interest in helping me, I strongly appreciate your time.

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Answer 3

paulddrix Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 23, 2018 10:48 AM in response to BobHarris

Thank you for your response, I am working on ubuntu and the posts that I read either they could read from the drive and just needed write functionality or they removed the journaling on a mac before hand. I can see the drive from the disks app but if I mount either the EFI partition or the Apple boot partition I can see it on ubuntu's file explorer but when I access the mount partition it is blank. I will take a stab at simply decrypting the drive with a friend's mac, I tried all the commands on the askubuntu and superuser stackexchange forums but no success. Thank you both for your time and effort.

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

685,221 points

Feb 22, 2018 7:26 PM in response to paulddrix

If I understand you question correctly, there is no way to access the drive without using a computer.

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Answer 5

paulddrix Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 22, 2018 7:34 PM in response to Eric Root

so there is not software that can provide a way to decrypt the way mac does it?

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Answer 6

Eric Root

Level 10

685,221 points

Feb 22, 2018 7:55 PM in response to paulddrix

If I'm understanding what you want to do, even if you decrepit the drive, there is no way to access it without a computer. An external hard drive needs a computer to access it.

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Access encrypted external drive

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