Kevin oneil - 2026-07-30

hello,
Is it possible to extract the password header from a Rescue Disk?

I lost the password to my encrypted HDD, although I’m honestly not sure whether the header is still intact or if it has been damaged.

I have a small list of around 100 possible password variants, along with different PIM values, and I’d like to try all of them automatically. If I boot from the Rescue Disk and test them manually, it would take an extremely long time.

My understanding is that automated password recovery tools require the password header to be extracted first so they can repeatedly attempt to decrypt it offline.

The problem is that if I extract the header from the HDD itself, a password recovery attempt might fail simply because the HDD’s header is already corrupted, even if one of the passwords is actually correct.

I also know that restoring the Rescue Disk header back to the HDD requires the correct password, so I can’t use that option unless I already know the password.

Is there any way to extract the encryption header from the Rescue Disk itself so I can use it for offline password testing? If so, how can this be done?

thanks for any help