Safe Eject the drive from the computer.Disconnect the drive from the computer and retry the password attempts.Once the process begins, ALL THE DATA ON THE DRIVE WILL BE LOST!įollow the steps to resolve an invalid or forgotten password on a WD My Passport or My Book External Drive.Įntering the incorrect password will result in a Invalid password message.Įxceeding the maximum of 5 password attempts will result in a 5 Incorrect Attempts message.

The Erase drive process is Data Destructive and cannot be undone.The drive can still be used and reformatted by clicking the Erase button.WD Technical Support cannot provide a new password or alternative method to access encrypted data.If the password cannot be remembered, the files on the drive are not accessible.There is no 'forgot password' option to reset the password.If the password is forgotten, the information stored on the hard drive cannot be retrieved.

A failed drive or a drive with file system or media errors can result in failed access.The WD Security password protection is a 256-bit AES encryption.I have no experience with partitioned external drives, so I know not if this could suggest that they are actually two separate physical units (something 'hacked' in the SATA-to-USB controller, maybe?) or it is just me unable to properly erase the hard drive and forget about that damn VCD. One strange thing I noticed is that even when the drive is unmounted, I have the option to mount separately the virtual CD and the drive itself. I tried with both fdisk and parted, but I may have done something wrong. I connected that evil drive to my Ubuntu Server 14.04.

I opened Microsoft's System Registry utility to force-allow write on the protected media, and just when I was about to start partying, I realized I failed once again.

with Windows, I launched HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, as somebody has claimed it to have had success, but I ended up with a 'Device media is write-protected' error.

again, I wasted some time with OS X and some built-in command-line tools (which I guess are just the command-line counterpart of the Disk Utility app).

with Windows 10, I tried removing all partitions from the physical drive with the built-in Disk Manager and some other tools like EaseUS Partition Master.

I also tried to change from MBR to GUID and vice-versa with no success.

under OS X, I tried to initialize the physical drive several times with Apple's Disk Utility.

Whenever I plug this device into a computer, there is a virtual CD unit that pops up called 'WD Unlocker', and I'm trying to remove it physically, instead of just hiding it (I found many guides on this, and by the way none of them worked). I have a WD My Book (3TB storage, USB 3), and just like many other enthusiast owners of this external drive, I'm trying to get rid of their crapware.

Wd my passport ultra unlock password