Your My Passport Ultra drive is locked

Case study of a Western Digital My Passport Ultra 500GB

Your My Passport Ultra drive is locked

WD500LMVW-11VEDS2

Part Number:WDBPGC5000ATT-05

WD Family: HubbleLT

We took a call from a customer that tried to input their password several times but to no avail.

After researching various online guides and trying them, without success, they reached out to us for help. Could we help them by recovering their trapped data?

Luckily enough for them, we have had good results from drives like this before. Although, its not quite as simple as removing the password, but the method we use still gives the same result.

Into the Lab we go ….

This issue typically stems from hardware problems.

Whereby the operating system (SA) of the drive becomes corrupted and cannot distinguish between a working password and the wrong one. Often, the magnetic read/write heads are too weak to register with the drive and end up making things worse. Therefore the problem just creates a loop and the user ends up going around in circles.

So, what do we do to fix this problem, well the short answer is, it depends what’s wrong with the drive?

Quite often we need to fit some new parts and then start fixing the corrupted operating system (SA).

Then we need to deal with the SED (Self-encrypting-drive) side of things and deactivate the password function. In addition, the data also needs decrypting using the embedded decryption key located on the drive itself. Only then can we recover the data for the customer.

To conclude this case study, we got our customer a 100% recovery which we were very pleased with, as was the customer 🙂

For specs and more information about ‘Western Digital My Passport Ultra’ hard drives, please visit the  WD support page here

If you need help recovering data from a locked Western Digital My Passport Ultra hard drive, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here