How can I recover my Chrome passwords from my broken hard drive?

My hard drive has bad sectors and I cannot boot from it, so I’ve installed an SSD with Windows 10. I’ve transferred my Chrome profile over to the SSD, but passwords haven’t been transferred!.
I have synced my google chrome with the cloud, so the passwords are not in google.
Is there any way to transfer my passwords from the old hard drive? (it’s still working, but has bad sectors and won’t boot).

Any help much appreciated.

Windows version 1909

dalchina said:

Hi, asking Google
where does Chrome store its passwords

is the first step - two suggestions are given here, and which are relevant depends on your usage:
Anyone know how to find the password file for chrome on a hard drive? - Web Browsing/Email and Other Internet Applications

If your passwords were synched, then recovery is easy and independent of your drive.

Otherwise,


You can of course try to access that on your defective drive connected as an external drive- and hope it's intact.

However I have no idea whether transferring such a file to another instance of the browser will work. That thread indicates not.

This is a detailed Chrome question and as such might be better addressed on a Chrome forum.


I'll offer the same advice on protecting your time and your data as I've given so many times.

a. Use disk imaging routinely e.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + external storage. The you can often recover without technical help. Recommended endlessly here.

The very act of imaging requires your disk be sound. Thus if it fails to complete an image, you get an error message and are alterted.

Weekly imaging - even daily- and you see how little you may risk losing.

b. Run e.g. Crystal Diskinfo (free) set to alert you to disk degradation using SMART parameters vs thresholds.
Early warning system.

Thanks for your answer. I've posted the question to google communities. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for your advice on that imaging software, I'll have a look at it.

Samuria said:

Simply goto Google password site and they should be there

I also stated in my post "even if they don't have a google account synched." Most customers don't use any form of cloud syncing.

On a new machine I even created a new user account similar to the one they had before, and even used the same password.

What I did do this time that worked, but may not depending on the situation, is plug the drive into one of my new build 11th gen computers. After Windows 10 stated "Getting devices ready" it finally booted into their old Windows and I went to Chrome and exported the passwords. Then in the new computer I imported the passwords.

Luckily I had a newer system to use since the old drive was GPT, and an old desktop I initially tried didn't boot because it was too old, even had UEFI enabled.

I also just tried a newer version of ChromePass from NirSoft and that did the trick too. I entered all the advanced paths and the user's login password and it decrypted all the passwords.

So I'd say first find out if Sync was enabled if they had a "cloud" account. Second try ChromePass and enter in all the advanced paths. Third pull the drive and try to boot it in another computer, hopefully with a compatible booting mode.

Samuria said:

Google password sites stores passwords even with sync turned off

Even without a Google account logged into Chrome?