I purchased a WD Caviar Green 1TB drive March of 2012, and installed it in a Dell Optiplex280 Desk top system. The Operating System, Window XP, loaded and the 1TB drive worked as expected. I decided to upgrade to Windows 7 but found out that the Dell 280 would not support Windows 7 so I bought a new Dell Optiplex745 with a 150GB drive. When I ordered the 745 I requested they put in cabling for my WD 1TB drive so I could have a second drive for photo storage. Before I removed the 1TB drive from the Dell 280 system I purchased and used WipeDrive six to clean the 1TB drive thinking I would start with an empty secondary drive in my Dell 745 for my photo storage. Note, when I installed the 1TB in the 280 system I was never asked nor did I assign a password to the 1TB drive.
After installing the 1TB drive in the Dell 745 and rebooting the system I now get an error message for the 1TB drive:
“Hard Drive #CAV5F010039-3A5B (-595B) is protected by a password”.
Enter the password or press to exit.
(Disk remains locked if is used)
Enter Password: _
When I hit esc the system bypasses the 1TB drive and finishes booting and works fine, but I cannot access the 1TB drive without a password.
I have contacted Wipedrive and they said that they do not embed any passwords and since I was never asked nor assigned any password to the 1TB drive when I initially installed it in the Dell280 system and Wipedrive would have erased any password, I can only assume that Western Digital has embedded a password. Is there any way to get the password or a temporary one so I can get in and reset the drive?
Here are the numbers and nomenclature of my 1TB drive:
1.0TB SATA/64mb cache WDIOEARS
S/N
MDL: WDIOEARS-22Y5B1
WWN:50014EE25A237DI0 LBA:1953525168
DATE: 24 JULY 2010 5VDC: 0.70A
DCM: 1013YF150 R/N: 701640
WD CAVIAR GREEN
Again thanks for the help
Johnp51