"Barry Watzman" <WatzmanNOSPAM@neo.rr.com> wrote in message
news:45c4b406$0$9009$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
> Re: "The other half of the hash (to decode) was back in the original
> laptop. Preventing someone from getting at it, especially by stealing
> the drive, is just what that security is for; i.e., unless the drive
> is in the original laptop that hashed up the drive's contents AND you
> know the password, you will never get at the decoded contents of the
> drive."
>
> I don't think that's correct. This isn't windows,

I don't care what OS is on the drive, encrypted or not. The whole-disk
encryption is performed in hardware. Half of that support is on the
hard drive, the other half is back in the mobo. If the drive wanders
off from the mobo that hashed up the drive, that drive cannot be
decoded. It is very similar to e-mail encryption: the source (owner of
the certificate or the mobo) has the "private" portion and the target
(recipient or hard drive) has the "public" portion. Without both,
there's no decryption, and the source controls that.

> this is an IDE

Yep, as I said, this hardware encryption was first provided in ATA-3
specification. It is NOT solely implemented on the hard drive alone.
Unfortunately it costs to get copies of the ATA specs from
http://www.t13.org/ and I really don't need them.

> Otherwise, as has happened here, if the computer motherboard dies,
> then the drive is lost, and that is beyond secure, it is "data
> endangering".

Yep, that is what happens. And that is why you MUST do data backups
since they won't depend on the private key for the encryption that the
mobo has. The backups can either be open in that anyone could restore
from them or you would password-protect them, but that password
protection is entirely within the backup file so you could use another
computer running the same backup program to restore your data because
the password was only used to encode the file (i.e., there is no
separation of private and public keys, there is just the one key used to
encode the file).