Winrar Password Finder

[frogman]

I have a particular .RAR file that I have forgotten the password for, is there program that works for Windows 98 that I could use that would retrieve the password?

My version of Winrar is 3.30

[dencorso]

Yes. But brute-forcing rar passwords (any arbitrary case-variable symbol-alphanumeric passwords of 8 or more characters) may take hundreds of years, even if you have a pretty impressive computer farm, unless you know a lot about the password beforehand. See: this and this. Doing it with 9x/ME only makes it more difficult, because this is best done by massively parallel computing, to have a chance of success.

[frogman]

I knew it wouldn't be easy, thanks anyway.

[technoid]

Well, I had past success finding a lost password for a zip file I had using PicoZip. Took maybe a minute or so to retrieve it, so I guess it's going to depend on your password complexity. It's been years since I used it, but now that you've reminded me, I still have a few more secure compressed files that I've lost passwords on, so I think I'll download PZ again and try it. Per the feature list, it should handle .rar. Good luck and let us know.

http://picozip.com/

[frogman]

Well, I had past success finding a lost password for a zip file I had using PicoZip. Took maybe a minute or so to retrieve it, so I guess it's going to depend on your password complexity. It's been years since I used it, but now that you've reminded me, I still have a few more secure compressed files that I've lost passwords on, so I think I'll download PZ again and try it. Per the feature list, it should handle .rar. Good luck and let us know.

http://picozip.com/

Does this program actually have the ability to find passwords on rar files?

[frogman]

That program mentions passwords for zip files but no mention of rar files, does it do password retrieval for rar files too do you know?

Anyway did you get my PM?

[technoid]

Yes, got your PM.

Ok so maybe PicoRT may not be the right tool for you, it's probably only for Zip, idk. Like I said, I haven't used it in years. I perused my drives and I found the last time I used it was in 2002, so that's 11 years ago, and an older version at that, although it seems their latest version is really only a year later than mine, in 2003. I took a look around in http://picozip.com/prt/index.html and did not really see anything about Rar, so yeah, not sure. I have not downloaded the latest version yet. You can try contacting them with your issue.

So if Pico won't work, I did a Google, see if these help: http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=password+recovery+tool+rar&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Lastly, as long as you got at least a Pentium, the process shouldn't take that long for these tools to recover, versus on a 80486 or older.

[bphlpt]

@frogman, if you find an app that works for you, please let us know. Your experience might help others in a similar situation.

Cheers and Regards

[frogman]

Although this program didn't find the password as I didn't have the time to leave it checking I did do a test on it and it found a password I had created myself on a personal rar archive I made myself.

The program is called Appnimi RAR Password Unlocker and users are prompted to download version 2.3, like I say it seems to work on Windows 98 S.E

[frogman]

Lastly, as long as you got at least a Pentium, the process shouldn't take that long for these tools to recover, versus on a 80486 or older.

It's an Athlon 1Ghz processor I have which is around 12 years old.

The problem really is that unless you know how many characters were used in the password you are trying to find then the time taken to find it could well be endless as you are required to set the parameters when using the Brute Force option, and the more there is the longer it will take.

When I did the test I made a password with the letter a and the program found it but it brought it up as A, which is fine if it's a short PW, however if it's a long password then it might take a while to decide which characters will be in upper case or lover case, perhaps it's a bug with the program.