I’ve inherited a couple old WD external drives, which likely contain audio & video recordings of concerts which need to be archived in a more secure manner.
Currently, the one I have plugged in (model wdbaaf0010hbk-01) is visible in WD Discovery, and in WD Drive Utilities, but I can’t find or access the contents in Windows 11 File Explorer.
In Discovery, it appears as just “My Book” with an icon, but no details. I can affect the LED On status through the Settings, and I’m offered a chance to set a password.
In WD Drive utilities, I get a green checkmark and “SMART status passed” when I check the status. And running a Quick Drive Test results in another Green Checkmark. Again I can alter the LED status.
Nothing anywhere indicates that the drive is Locked by password or any other mechanism. What am I missing?
Thanks.
Check Disk Management. Windows tools can see the drive even when File Explorer can’t mount it. Right-click Start - Disk Management and look for the My Book there. If it has no drive letter, assign one and it’ll show up immediately. If it shows as RAW or a Mac formatted volume, Windows can’t read it as is. This isn’t a bad drive or a hidden password, it’s just not mounted in a way Windows understands.
Boy, how I wish your suggestion worked. I’ve looked at the drive with the Disk Manager under both Windows 10 and Windows 11. In either case, all options for all volumes are greyed out, except for “Delete Volume” which isn’t what I want to do.
I can see the drive: Basic, Online, ~1Tb. I can see 3 volumes on it: a Healthy EFI system partition, a Healthy primary partition of ~930 GB, and a healthy primary partition of 128 MB. EaseUS tells me the two latter volumes are unformatted.
Ah - turns out it was a “Time Machine” drive for a mac. Although I can’t see anything in there that way either. I’ve obviously botched this up. Oh, well. Let’s hope I got everything I needed from it.
