WD2500 & WD2500JS Internal Drives Locked, Cannot Unlock

[d1k]

Hello,
I did a search and did not see anything related to locked Internal drives so here we go.

I purchased a box of 20 x 250GB Western Digital Internal hard disk drives, model numbers WD2500 and WD2500JS, off of ebay and I’m pretty sure I just got ripped off. Using the Western Digital Data Life Guard software the drives scan error free but show that they are locked, every single one of them, I cannot format them and/or use them at all.

I have searched on-line about ways to unlock these suckers, the “master password” thing didn’t work, this Smartware for Windows didn’t help, cannot flash new firmware to them at all. I see no other way to unlock these things, can someone please help me out here?

[ArMak]

Hello,

As far as i know, internal drives do not have password protection. Perhaps this could be done by a computer.

[Myron]

You sure? In my computer I have a Hitachi drive and I can assign a password to it which renders it useless to any hardware that can’t give it the right password. I’m not sure if WD drives are capable of such a password lock.

[d1k]

Can any Western Digital reps help out here please? How can I unlock these drives?

[LeStroumpf]

WD HDD have the capability of locking the drive with a password that’s stored in the drive. From all the research I did on Internet, there is NO way for an end user to recover the password. There are cie that specialize in recovering data on drives, even if they are locked with a master password; they do not use regular O/S or hardware to do that. For about US$100 you can find a company that will unlock, or at least recover the data!

[fzabkar]

Ask or search at HDD Guru. There is a way.

[d1k]

Holy cow, 6 years later I get replies lol.

Thanks very much guys, I’m going to check out HDD Guru.

Dear Western Digital. 6 years go by and not a single WD rep replied to this thread. This is exactly why I stopped buying your products and more importantly stopped recommending them. Shame on you.