How to remove My Passport drive encryption? I have the password

Portable Drives My Passport
1

Hi experts, I have used the included WD encryption for years on the 2TB My Passport drive USB drive.

I am trying to completely remove the WD encryption, so that I can replace it with Bitlocker that is on my Windows 11 Pro laptop.

In Windows Disk Management the WD drive shows as a 30MB Virtual CD “WD Unlocker” partition, and a 1.8TB partition.

I can unlock the drive by providing my WD encryption password, by running the VCD’s WD Unlock Drive exe.

I have backed up the contents of the 1.8TB partition.

Using diskpart as Admin I was able to delete the 1.8TB partition, and then recreated it as a new 1.8TB NTFS volume.

However, I can only access the new 1.8TB NTFS volume after I first provide my WD encryption password, by running the VCD’s WD Unlock Drive exe. If I do not do this, I am unable to access the 1.8TB NTFS volume - as example if I unplug then plug in the USB cable again.

So the WD encryption is still active and controlling access to the 1.8TB volume.

FYI I have not been able to delete the 30MB VCD “WD Unlocker” partition - even when running as Admin. I even tried removing it’s drive letter temporarily, but that did not help - I had to reinstate the VCD drive letter to unlock the 1.8TB drive.

Help please!

Once I can get thru the above, I know how to setup a new drive with Bitlocker, so no guidance is needed in that area.

Thanks. Keith

2

I got the answer from WD Support:

Download and run WD Drive Utilities. Choose Drive Erase. Done.

The 30MB VCD “WD Unlocker” partition is gone, and I was able to encrypt the new 1.8TB NTFS volume with Bitlocker.

Hope this helps someone else.

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