CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsdelphiusbbrute-forceemulation
hrmncd
hrmncd

Reputation: 1045

Emulation of ejecting and plugging in a USB drive on Windows

I forgot my WD Passport Ultra disk's hardware encryption password and I am having a Delphi software being programmed for finding this password using brute force method. Original WD Security software will be used for password entries, but WD Security software locks itself at every 5 wrong password entries. Then the drive needs to be physically ejected and plugged in to reset this counter.

Therefore the software being programmed must emulate safely removing and plugging in of an external USB hard disk drive on Windows on software level, as this is necessary for resetting the wrong password counter of WD Security software.

Disabling/enabling the drive using "devcon" does not reset the counter.

Finding out the storage location of this counter information would be very helpful. When the counter is at 4, safely removing the drive and plugging in to another computer resets the counter. This made me guess that the counter is stored on the USB drive and it is reset by drive's firmware during plugging in process.

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1173

Answers (1)

Andre Ruebel
Andre Ruebel

Reputation: 564

This page http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools.html contains the best collection of tools related to USB drive handling I know. It provides commandline tools which you could execute from your program. Unfortunately this page is german, so I give you a hint to the most relevant tools:

  1. RemoveDrive: ejects a drive with the given letter or name
  2. DriveCleanup: cleans the usb device tree in the registry. By doing this Windows forgets about this device and installs the drivers again. This also assigns the drive letter again. You might use this to find out if the information on the device that WD Security remembers is depending on the device information stored on your computer (which is most likely according your description)
  3. RestartSrDev: This is finally what you are searching for most. As is written on the site (and this is also my knowledge), it is not possible to restart a usb drive that was once ejected without removing the cable and plugging it back in. This is the bad news. The good news is that this tool tries to reset the hub on which the drive is attached which also reconnects all devices on that hub. This does not necessarily work, but is the only way known to restart a drive without removing the cable.

Your chances are not too good, but with these tools you have all possibilities to first test whether you have a chance to do what you want at all and if this works with the Tools I would recommend not to program this functionality, but to call these commandline programs from you brute force code.

Tools 2 and 3 need admin privilege.

Good luck.

Upvotes: 2

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