at first I want to tell you, that I am from Germany and does not write very well english.
I have red in the WDC Community a lot about the fact, that the Western Digital MY Passport set an password and the Drive is encryptet. The only way to reuse the Drive is to format it. But at this time all data get lost.
I have spend many of hours for tests. And now there is a possibility for me to get back files from the encrypted disk!
If you have the problem that there are important files/documents on your WD My Passport, send me a PN.
We will get a solution and restore data.
I would be happy if I can help some members of this Community!
Got similar problem. I had the PCB replaced on my passport elite. Also resoldered those two 8-legged chips from the old original PCB. Now the drive is being recognized by the WD smart ware but it says that there were too many password attempts and the only way is to erase it, which I want to avoid. Anyone has an idea how to overcome this issue. I do not care about the disk, data only matters.
Disconnect the drive properly unplug if powered reboot and hook backup it should give 5 more tries. Something I just read lastninght. Try loggin from another account of the PC like a guest account.
I think the true solution is just not to put a password. I really dont think you can recover the data unless your some data recovery company. Sounds fishy anybody reading this thread be warned DO NOT GIVE OUT P/N OR S/N NUMBERS
The reason companies would not be able to retreive passwords is because it could cause some legal problems. Imagine someone stealing your drive and calling WD to recover there claimed to be lost or forgotten password saying its theres hard drive. So WD just doesnt even create a way to retreive it so that they dontfall into a big mess.
Just make sure you keep multiple copies of data so that you dont have 1 single point of failure.
Well I do not want to erase the disk. The problem is that I haven’t encrypted it and the password was not set, when my usb connector got bad. All this [deleted], which happened to me, occured only because WD decided to put such faulty, small USB connector on the PCB and when it got broken, the only chance for me was to replace the whole PCB.
The question is, should I resolder any extra chip from the old pcb to make it alive again? Is there any chance to get it working?
Does anyone knows which chip holds the encryption algoritm for the hardware disk encryption?
The only person who actually understands these boards is fzabkar. He has helped people that fried them and at least one add wires where the port broke off and use something other than USB try searching for some of his posts. Some people have had a password set automatically and have been able to access the drive from another account on that computer.
I can’t find it now. I think it was in the last week. It was one of the old long posts where a password was automatically set but the user never set a password. Somebody posted they could access their data by loggin in on a different user account and there were a couple others saying it worked for them. This autoset password has a unknown cause but possibly firmware update is involved. If the firmware got corrupted in update who knows what’s possible. It’s easy enough to try and won’t cause any problem!
