WD Format (Not Recover) Un-allocated, un-initialized.

[Deroqshazam]

Hello all,

Me and my brother have an older WD My Passport 1TB drive that he cannot remember the password. We ARE NOT concerned with the stuff thats on it, at this point everything he wants to back up is still on his computer, he just wanted to format it and get it to a usable state so we can backup afterwards. We are on a Mac but have tried to format it on a windows 7 computer as well (Which, in storage manager, I saw it says it is unallocated and unable to be initialized because it is write protected) It will not allow us to get past the unlock section. When plugged into a mac it only is reading as a virtual disk, so disk recovery isn't doing anything either. Same goes for windows but as I said it's only able to be seen through the diskpart.exe and in the storage manager, and neither are able too make changes (Just reads as a 930GB Disk, unallocated).

From what I know, it seems to be acting okay, reads as functioning properly when I am able to see it, but most of the time that fire wall thing won't let us see it. The WD people said the thing should automatically come up with a prompt to re-format when you guess the password incorrectly, but nothing happens. I'm not sure if it's because it's an old firmware or if because the Drive is corrupt, but like I said, from what I've read it seems okay.

thank you for your time,
Derrick

[SOSdonnees]

Hi,

If this is just for the price of the drive (i.e. not recovering data), I would give up.

Those drives are crap and make data recoveries difficult.
Much better for the security of your files is to buy a SATA laptop hard drive and put it in a SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure.

[barryware]

You need to use the WD utility.The drive comes with a software CD or you can download it.

It also makes a diff between USB 2 & USB 3 in regard to ports on your PC. Use USB 2 if you can with the WD utility.

[fzabkar]

Can you show us the drive's SMART report? You can use CrystalDiskInfo or smartmontools.

You can also use HDDSuperTool to read the drive's firmware resources:
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsupertool

Use this script:
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsu ... ects=0&d=1

[Deroqshazam]

Like I said I don't care about recovery or security. I just want to nuke it and start over. But do you think it's not even worth that?

And I've tried all the WD apps. It just won't read. Only way it reads is with the virtual CD to unlock or setup.