WD My Book suddenly read only; can't find it with Drive Utilities

Announcements & Discussions Off-Topic Discussions
1

Of a sudden, the MyBook 3tb external drive I’ve always used for backup has become read only. Also, I can’t use the WD Drive Utilities to “see” the drive in question. This all started when the My Book did not show on “This PC.” I had to unplug the USB connection, then replug it to have WD Unlocker pop up so I could enter the password and open the drive. I’m using Windows 10, 64bit, on a Dell computer with an i7 processor and 24gb of RAM. I’ve tried to find the key in RegEdit to unlock external drives, but the key indicated by Microsoft (and others) is not available in the registry for the current version of Windows 10, which is 1803. Suggestions?

Thank!

2

WD Security uses hardware encryption to protect the My Book and you must use the password to unlock the hard drive. Without unlocking the drive, would not be possible to access or recover the data from the hard drive.

However, after some unsuccessful password attempts you can erase the drive if want to use My Book from the start.