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I recently downloaded from Comodo their disk encryption software and started encrypting my "c" drive, but didn't know it would take at least 2-3 hours to encrypt and I started at 11:30 at night.

I set the password and the algorithm and got about 10 minutes into it. It was going good but I didn't want to wait for 2 or 3 hours so I canceled it and finished my other stuff and turned it off.

The next day I started it and asked for password right away and would not let me type it in.

(I have windows xp sp3 32 bit)

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Welcome to an encrypted drive. There's only one way in and out. You forget the key, you pay the piper for a new one. – music2myear Jul 18 '11 at 21:43
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If you can't remember the password, you'll need to format your drive and restore from backup.

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It may just be not printing the characters to your screen when typing your password at lot of secure systems do this to stop casual eyes seeing how many characters you typed. Try typing your password and hitting enter

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Or, like IBM in Lotus Notes they present a number of characters not equal to the number you typed. When a really astute observational hacker would be able to count the clicks of the keys as you type, defeating both cases. – music2myear Jul 18 '11 at 21:55
@music maybe throw in some dummy key presses in there to throw them off – Stephen Martin Jul 18 '11 at 21:59
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It's not too hard to tell the difference between a partial key press and a full key press if you are familiar with the keyboard and/or the typist. Also, backspaces tend to sound different due to the pinky stretch necessary to reach it. Generally, good security is satisfied with sufficiently strong passwords regardless of how or whether the asterik characters are displayed. – music2myear Jul 18 '11 at 22:01
@music it's still good practice to write programs that don't print tokens to the screen when typing passwords, don't even get me started on IPhone it actually shows the entered char enlarged for any one to see. – Stephen Martin Jul 18 '11 at 22:06
With the iPhone you're having to balance usability of the tiny screen keyboard and accuracy and security. A hard call in any case. – music2myear Jul 18 '11 at 22:07
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