my Passport was working wonderful, I was able to pull all my needed info off of my dying computer, when I got a new computer, I set it to pull some files off of the drive and put onto the new computer. Then here starts the problem, I am now trying to pull more files off of it and put on files from the new computer and every time I try to connect it, it takes at least 5 minutes for SmartWare to even recongnize it, and when it finally does, it asks for a password. The problem is, I never passworded the hard drive to begin with and if I did it by off chance, it would only be 1 choice, so I tempted putting it in and it is telling me invalid password. Now my drive is locked and I can’t access anything on it. HELP!?!
Hate to say it, but as far as I know you have three choices:
- enter a wrong password 5 times and then format the drive, losing your data
- request an RMA and get the drive replaced, losing your data
- pay a gazillion dollars for a data-recovery company to try and decrypt the data stored on the drive
WD can not retrieve a password for a lockable drive.
And it won’t do any good taking it out of the case because the data is encrypted by the circuit board. One thing a couple posters have had luck with is disconnecting drive logging in on another account like the guest account and hooking drive backup.
Joe.
