Patent ID: 8245054

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a storage device having: a plurality of access-restricted areas, wherein an access-restricted area comprises a portion of a hard disk drive having a user-specific execution environment accessible on condition that a password of a user assigned to the access-restricted area is properly authenticated; and an access-unrestricted area, wherein the access-unrestricted area comprises another portion of the hard disk drive having an unrestricted execution environment and a password retrieval program therein, the access-unrestricted area being accessible by the one or more users regardless of whether a password of a user assigned to the access-restricted area is authenticated; a password registration director which directs a registration server to register one or more passwords of users assigned to the plurality of access-restricted areas in the registration server; a password prompter which prompts a user to enter a password in response to the user attempting to access an access-restricted area; a password retrieval program activator which reads from the access-unrestricted area a password retrieval program which retrieves a password from the registration server and activates the password retrieval program, on condition that an entered password is not properly authenticated; a password retriever which retrieves a password from the registration server by running the password retrieval program; and an access controller which places an access-restricted area in an accessible state by causing the storage device to authenticate the retrieved password.