Passwords on WD Drives

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

coljmeggen.cap@cox.net

The WD Greens don’t have hardware passwords.

The Dell Optiplex 745 is a fairly old system. Did you order it refurbished or second-hand?

Have you checked the BIOS settings to see if you can disable or set the password lock there?

Sir,

I ordered it from Discount Electronic out of Texas. They put together the system I wanted, to handle the extra 1TB drive and a bigger video card to handle PhotoShop. As for the BIOS settings. No I have not, could you detail how I get in and do the reset. I have not fiddled with the BIOS before.

I have a Dr appointment so I won’t be able to respond for a while. I live in Phoenix, Arizona.

Thank you for your help I really don’t want to just trash can this drive.

Johnp51    

You’d need to check with Dell on that…

Thanks, I’ll contact Dell

Johnp51