I have a Western Digital 4TB hard drive, and everything has been going well until recently where I had to move a computer from one room to the next. Everything was turned off and then unplugged to be moved. I plugged it all back in, turned it all back on, and then suddenly it’s locked me out. I also previously before putting any data on it (this was months ago now) formatted it to be ext4 for internal use with my computer (Arch btw). Now a thing pops up in Removable Devices called WD Unlocker. I looked for everything to help me. I even plugged it into a Windows computer I had lying around to use the tool. I never put a password on it, so the tutorials were kind of useless and despite running the unlocker .exe it still won’t let me access anything on it. The error message I get at the top of Dolphin says an error occurred while accessing mydrive, the system responded: an unspecified error has occurred. Did not recieve reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. I was able to get access to some files somehow like 2 days ago, but now I’m dealing with the same issue, regardless of booting the computer, and cycling on and off, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix this. I even tried using a partition manager to see what was up, but it either loads in days amounts of time, or will pull up but not show what could be causing this since I didn’t expect any software to be active on it since originally formatting. Please help me. I don’t want to lose almost 4TB of stuff just because it’s acting stupid on me. I feel like I’ve tried everything, and the only other answer from looking things up I’ve gotten was that WD drives are stupid as hell for this specific reason. I’m at my wits end.

  • GeorgimusPrime@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Some Western Digital drives have encryption on the USB/SATA controller in the external case. If that’s the case, you should be able to access your data if you take it out if the case and put it in the Arch computer where you formatted it, or use another case or USB/SATA adapter.

    • fleebleneeble@reddthat.comOP
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      2 months ago

      I’ll have to get an adapter. I cracked it open to find that it’s not what I was expecting and couldn’t plug it in to anything until I have something for it.

  • timetraveller@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Unsure about windows.

    But read up on the type of drive.

    I found significant weirdness dealing with the SMR 5TB drive until I stopped using it in ways that stressed the drive’s memory bandwidth.

    Tl;dr SMR drives are slow, but safe if used to mostly write content instead of overwriting content.

    https://www.howtogeek.com/803276/cmr-vs.-smr-hard-drives-whats-the-difference/

    https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50697/~/steps-to-determine-if-an-internal-drive-uses-cmr-or-smr-technology

    • fleebleneeble@reddthat.comOP
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      2 months ago

      WD Drive Plus, portable HDD. Model no.: WDBZC0040BBK-WEWM. This does have 256-bit encryption, but I also never set up any password or anything as I mentioned earlier. It was exfat when I bought it and changed it to ext4 so I could use it on my Arch computer. Haven’t had any issues til about a little less than a week ago now. I also always make sure nothing is moving or making sounds, etc. before I unplug and move things. No visible exterior damage, and nothing tinking around internally.

      • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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        2 months ago

        Those drives have two partitions, or maybe one is a firmware fake partition. The encryption is supposed to lock the data drive, the unlocker acts like a CDROM DVDROM drive mount; That you have to run for the decryption of data drive.

        Not sure why it changed for you. Maybe the power cycle flipped a flag to start the unlocker?

        If you have Windows app, you can reset it but you’ll lose data. You can try taking drive out of the case and mounting it direct to see if your partition can mount on its own.

        I do have some Linux tools if you ever do need to unlock it with the known password

        • fleebleneeble@reddthat.comOP
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          2 months ago

          I cracked it open and to no avail. I’ll need adapters. I finally was able to look at it on GParted, but it only shows the main 4TB partition and then a smaller unallocated 1mb partition that I can’t do anything with, not even delete it.

          • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            Hmm could it be a bad cable that gave you the intermittent access?

            Also it probably won’t let you delete if drive is locked, could be a firmware thing

            • fleebleneeble@reddthat.comOP
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              2 months ago

              I’m not sure. There doesn’t seem to be issues with the cable from what I can tell. I would love to buy extra cables and adapters for everything I have, I just don’t have the means at the moment. I’m getting the itch to just say fuck it and wipe everything and start over from scratch. I hate the idea, and I don’t want to lose stuff, but I don’t know if I can save up for some of the things I need to check further. I’m trying to talk myself out of that and just be patient, I’m just exhausted.

              • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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                2 months ago

                I have had it where it sometimes won’t " boot " the drive up. Unplugging power and USB and reconnecting a few times sometimes gets it going. Overall they are flakey.