Winrar password problem

A couple of years ago, I compressed a file via Winrar and password protected it (It was on a machine on my office network).

Well, you can probably guess the reason of this post… I forgot the password. :wally:

I’ve tried to do a bit of research for cracking it, but I haven’t had much luck. I have downloaded a couple of demo password crackers and so far, no joy.

The problems I have are: I don’t remember how many characters in it, but I suspect it was more than 5 but less than 15. The demos that I tried all have fixed length number of characters.
I don’t think I used any weird characters (IE $,%,^). I know I didn’t use any standard words or phrases (the demo crackers I downloaded used a technique of trying common words/phrases just in case).

Regardkess, from what I understand, a brute force method for a 15 character password would take ages to crack. Is there some way a person could “open” the file in a text-editor of some sort and figure it out? (Nah, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?)

Am I SOL here? It is not an emergency by anymeans that I recover the file, but it would be nice. I am not keen on spending $40 for a program that I’ll use once, and I’ll just forget about it before I do that.

I’m not sure what the SDMB policy is on discussing password crackers but I have a feeling your thread will be locked by a moderator before you get an answer.

Re: the OP: The current version of WinRAR has 128-bit encryption. You might email WinRAR support at support@rarlab.com but I wouldn’t expect much. From WinRAR’s help file FAQ: