I have searched and read about solutions to remove the unlocker from the Western Digital Drive. The drive is an external USB 3.0 500 GB drive. I see on the tag that the part number is 4064-705107-000.
One solution that I read about is the enter the password wrong 5 times. Supposedly, that would disable the unlocker. But, it didn’t.
Another solution was to run some sort of program from the “extras” folder on the drive. I don’t have that program. The extras folder simply doesn’t have that program in it. I may have previously deleted the program.
A third solution that I read about is to download and run the software called “WD Security for Mac.” When trying this method, one of the first screens that I come to wants me to create a password for that drive. This seems to be the opposite of what we want.
Ideally, I want to remove that small partition altogether and have just one big drive. But, at the very least I want to remove the prompt that is always asking for a password when I plug the drive in or try to use the drive after some period of non-use.
The WD locker seems absolutely detrimental to being able to use Time Machine with the drive.
By the way, I think the drive that I have is officially labeled as a Windows drive. But, I intend to use it with my Mac only for now.
I am also looking for a way to remove the “WD Unlocker”.
Not denying that the WD Unlocker may be useful in some instances, it can also be an hindrance and add unnecessary complexity which, in turn, is a potential source of trouble.
Simple is beautiful and it would be nice to just be able to get a clean formatted external disk with no unwanted frills.
Same problem here. Did a total reformat to HTF+ of 4T WD My Book back in mid 2013 and have used it as a partitioned backup system with no problems until now. After update to OS 10.12.6, the WD Unlocker virtual disk appeared on my screen and the My Book partitions did not. Disk Utility cannot find my original 4T Partitions, only the WD Virtual CD with WD Unlocker. How do I get rid of the WD Unlocker and get the Partitioned volumes to show up??
(Tried the usual unplugging, re-plugging of everything with no luck.)
I am wondering if we can reformat the WD unlocker partition. There are some tools, for example the disk manager in System Rescue CD that are quite resilient at tasks like this and I would think it could make “short work” of WD unlocker. However, I’m a little concerned that there would be consequences (like the program would lock you out of the main partition for good, in response to it getting deleted).
