I could tell him how to get unlimited guesses, or how to have a computer brute force the known plaintext blocks to deduce the PATA encryption mask once the drive's head assembly swapped or a sniffing controller board firmware mod used

the data is indeed well encrypted, but many zero blocks and xA5A5A5A5 blocks are in middle spans to tease out, but in locked state the heads cannot enter those block ranges.

He can connect the little drive to a computer and see if it is really using hardware encrypted zones or just software. If software, he can simply clone the drive with dd to a large image file for unlimited guesses later. I suspect its hardware by the tone of the article.

between dissertations ages ago, I toyed with this tech and I have written these tools for hard drives to HARDWARE lock and unlock hard drives for xbox, military, and other spooky stuff. Its basically a set of proprietary ATAPI commands and not in favor in the last decade.

https://xboxdevwiki.net/Hard_Drive

The ATA/ATAPI Command Set - 2 (ACS-2) specification [1] defines an optional SECURITY feature subset (chapter 7.43 - 7.48) which allows to limit access to the drive's data behind a hardware implemented locking mechanism:

https://vdocuments.mx/download/ataatapi-command-set-2-acs-2-rev4.html

The count of guesses is STORED in secure area of drive, not in flash, but the track can be imaged back using a different controller board or hacked controller board. Better yet, the ENCRYPTED rings can be copied to a massive virtual drive image meant for decryption by tools

It is true that the hardware might destroy data or at least prevent further guesses! he needs to image the raw encrypted zone blocks in a clean room! The heads normally are device specific horizontal offset alignment, but a paranoia pathological read mode will service one platter at a time in a head seek if needed, later.

As an entitled arrogant brainiac, I have no desire to aid non-L33t people, and its amusing to me that he never found a systems engineer contractor to lead him in the correct direction. This shit is not that complex.

Like this guy, I bet I too cant remember my encrypted hard drive partitions (ATAPI hardware crypto) either, but I can usually remember forgotten pass phrases when half sleeping while waking up.

Like this guy, $millions have flowed to the winds via happenstance on my cavalier attitude as well. Its sort of psychologically cleansing.

I actually used to get paid contract money to engage in both ends of this situation, so it seems so rudimentary to me.

I wish him well, but he needs to find the reclusive idiot savants to advise him and assist him.

= = = = = =

EDIT: he lost his paper passphrase, he lost access to his mini hard drive stored password, and he lost his password for his IRONKEY USB DEVICE. all 3. the paper is probably in a book, the hard drive is probably merely software encrytion using a common symmetrical block cypher, not hardware ATAPI, and his IRONKEY could be cracked plenty of ways including at the JTAG level, or glitching, or sacrificing one other to layer scrub in a rented scanning electron microscope for its master keys built in. typically the gates are covered with repetitive diagonal lines, and can be ablated or imaged. some are mere custom flash : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312551555_Reverse_engineering_Flash_EEPROM_memories_using_Scanning_Electron_Microscopy