The tape backup password bug

Some time ago I had a problem when I wanted to restore a program from one of my tapes. The backup program prompted for a password, which surprised me because as far as I knew I hadn't used the password option at the time when I had put the program on tape. How was this possible? Had I accidently hit a wrong key when I made the backup? Or was there an error on the tape, coincidently just at the byte in the tape directory where the information about whether the program was protected or not was stored? Now, that would have been a striking example of Murphy's law...

But then some time later the same thing happened with another program on another tape! This was really strange. Had I hit that wrong key twice? Without noticing anything? Had I really been that absent-minded?

I wondered what I could do about this? Naturally, I wanted to have my program back. But how? Was there a way to crack the password? I searched the web for a cracker program, but without any luck. Then I decided to try it for myself.

I wanted to see if I could find a way to get the passwords and perhaps find a way to decrypt them. Of course I wasn't sure if this would be possible, but it was worth to give it a try. Therefore I made a couple of backup's with passwords for testing purposes. I booted my computer in ms-dos mode and started my old ms-dos tape-backup program. When it had loaded the tape directory and the program prompted for the password, I aborted the program. Then I started a memory viewer to browse through the memory. Soon I found the tape directory. It looked liked this:

The most surprising thing about this was that the password was clearly vissible! It was not encrypted at all! (the other un-protected volumes had just 8 empty spaces on the place of the password). This was very good news! I wouldn't have to try to crack any passwords. I quickly changed the tapes and repeated the whole thing on the tapes with my lost volumes. This is what it looked like:

This looked wierd. What kind of a password was that? I could hardly believe that I had typed in such a password accidently. Then I looked at the other volume that was protected and saw that that one had exactly the same password! Could this really be the password that I was looking for? I started up Microsoft Backup '95 and entered the password. And YES! indeed, I could restore my lost volumes!

After I had solved the problem I browsed the web to see if I could find more information about this bug. The web searchers didn't give me any, but when I used DejaNews to search through old usenet articles, I noticed that several other people had experienced the same problem. Some of them with Microsoft Backup and some with Colorado Backup. A possible explanation for this could be that Microsoft Backup for Windows 95 is a clone of Colorado Backup.

Perhaps you are one of these people? Then the password that I found might work for you too!

But the problem is that the password is so weird. How does one type in 01 05 12 1F 02 03 1A 0B (hexadecimal) on the password prompt? Kinda hard, isn't it? Therefor I have made things a bit easier for you.

First download this file. The ZIP archive contains a file called "password.txt" with the 8 characters. Open this file with notepad. The 8 characters will appear as black squares. Select those 8 characters with the cursor and press CTRL+C.

Then start up your backup program. When the program prompts for a password press CTRL+V. This will put the password in the password field. Now pressing ENTER should give you your lost volume back.

Good luck!

Microsoft knows about this bug. Take a look at this page on the support section of their site, which describes the problem.

Here are a couple of handy programs for examining your system.
(These are ms-dos programs, by the way)