"Graham Mayor" wrote in message
...
There are lots of password crackers available - including the example I
referred to from my web site which does all that the one you referred to
can manage. Password crackers have one thing in common. The demos can
easily crack a password that comprises four characters. They do not work
so remarkably when you try to crack a password of 8 or more random
characters - and you only discover that after you have paid your money. A
decent password can be cracked eventually, but it will take a seriously
long time of continuous processing to do so. We have no idea what sort of
password strength the OP may have used.
I don't really get what your point here is. There IS software available to
crack passwords or use brute force and they do work. Your post sounded like
you were telling the OP that a password protected file cannot ever be opened
without the password. Despite your assertions to the contrary, software
does exist (like the one I pointed out) that can unlock a file regardless of
the password length in a relatively short time. The bottom line is that if
you need to access a password protected file, you CAN do it.
As others have reminded you - the OP does not have a floppy drive. He
needs a means of getting the data from floppy to his PC. The PC will
almost certainly have a USB port, which makes flash a simple means of data
transfer, provided he can get access to a floppy drive or can get someone
copy the floppy discs for him.
It's hard to "remind" someone of something that was never brought up. The
OP said nothing about flash drives. He did however, mention that the
original data was on a 1.44 MB floppy drive. I am not aware of ANY flash
drive ever made commercially that wasn't at least 5 times bigger than that
and those aren't even sold anymore. Such a small amount of data could
simply be emailed from the friend's machine to the OP's machine. No one
brought up flash drives but you and that's why I questioned it.
Despite your protestations elsewhere in this thread, opening documents
from removable media is a frequent source of data corruption, and there is
more than enough evidence to show that this is the case - we see it in
this forum every week. We have no idea how large the flash media the OP
may have available (I have one piece with 8mb capacity), nor any idea how
many files are involved. Accessing data directly from flash media *may*
not result in a problem, but equally it might, so as I don't know what we
are dealing with any more than you do, suggesting the safest course is the
best approach. The safest course is to copy the files to the hard drive
and open them from there.
As I've mentioned in another response in this thread, there is no
technilogical reason whatsoever for any more corruption with flash memory
than HDD memory. I agree that you may hear many more people talking about
corruption with flash memory than HDD memory, but in a NG, you will always
hear about the problems people have. People don't post to tell you that
everything worked as it should.
Flash memory can get corrupted in exactly the same manner than HDD memory
would get corrupted. But, with flash memory the most likely reason would be
that the drive was pulled while still being written to or read from. Your
brief "Don't do it!" message does not *inform* the newsgroup as to why you
are saying what you are saying. It leaves someone who doesn't know better
to believe that there is an inherent flaw with flash memory, which there is
not. It would have been more appropriate for you to say something like "Be
sure that the drive is no longer being accessed (by either checking the
access light on the drive or using the Hardware removal wizard in the system
tray) before you pull it out.
I have been a looooong time contributor to the MS NG's and I been seeing an
increasing amount of replies from MVP's that innacurately blame a technology
when the technology is fine, but the use of that technology is flawed or
incompletely recommend a solution, without indicating why that solution
should be used.
My goal in "nitpicking" your posts is to help newbies understand that, in
reality, flash memory is just as stable as HDD memory, but because it's
portable, the danger *potentially* lies in pulling the drive while it's
being accessed. If you don't do that, you'll hardly ever encounter any
corruption of files on flash media.
-Scott
--
Graham Mayor - Word MVP
My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org
Scott M. wrote:
I hardly think that Word documents saved in 1994 had XML metadata
stored along with them. And so, the information on your page would
not be useful.
Secondly, why do the disk files need to be copied to flash memory
before being put on to a hard drive? And for that matter, why can't
the files be opened from a flash drive?
Thirdly, there are MANY tools out there that use different techniques
to open a Word document that is password protected, here is just one
example of a very good tool:
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/d...sword_14353_p/
I'm sorry Graham, but your information is just either wrong or not
applicable in this circumstance.
-Scott
"Graham Mayor" wrote in message
...
There are two issues here - accessing the files and accessing the
protected documents. The first can be overcome by copying the discs
to flash memory and then you can copy them to the hard drive to
access them (DON'T access then from the flash memory).
If you don't know the passwords to open the documents, the chances of
opening them are slim to non-existent. The documents are encrypted
and you need the password to break the encryption. - see
http://www.gmayor.com/Remove_Password.htm
--
Graham Mayor - Word MVP
My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org
Water and Trees wrote:
In 1994 I prepared documents saving them to 3 1/2" discs. Recently
found the discs (there's a whole box) and would like to access them.
No slot on my current computer for them, but have a friend whose
computer does still allow discs. My problem is wanting to by-pass
the passwords I set for myself back in 1994.
These are basic Word documents and there may be a few WordPerfect
documents on these discs as well. I just want to get by the
passwords and get to the documents.
Any suggestions are appreciated!
Thanks,