Unlock.exe no longer accepts my password?

WD External and Portable SSD Portable SSD
1

Hello everybody,

i am little bit nervous to lose all the data (the work of years) on my 1TB My Passport 2,5" external HDD.

Some days ago i have changed the unlock password from a 13 character long password

to a 56 character long password (just to prevent possible brute-force attacks). Additionally i have updated

the Smartware software to the latest version. Well, i wish never did that (never touch a running system :cry:)…

After i changed the password to the new one i checked if it is working and everything was fine…until yesterday.

Since yesterday Smartware/Unlock.exe isn’t accepting the password anymore! It is definitely entered correctly

(i have written it to a piece of paper as well). I also tried to connect and access the drive on another PC,

without success. Keyboard is ok (no caps lock active or something like this) and i have not changed any hardware.

No i have used 4 of 5 password tries and do not dare to go on. I don’t want to lock me out completely.

Any ideas? :cry:

2

When you get the message thet you have used all your tried remove the drive safely then reconnect and you should get 5 more attempts. There is no reset or workaround for this. The data is hardware encrypted so removing the drive from enclosure is useless.

Joe

3

Thanks for your reply but the problem is not the amount of tries left,

the problem is the password isn’t working…and i am 110% sure it is

correct…:cry:

4

Today i found the solution and i am happy as **bleep** i did not gave up to early!!! :smileyvery-happy:

The WD support team i contacted was not a big help regarding this problem.

All they did was telling me that the data is lost and i should reformat the disk.

Thanks to god i refused to do so, otherwise i would have lost important data.

Now, what have i done? I followed my first thought regarding what might have

caused all this misery: changing the password from 14 characters to 56…

Noone was able to tell me if there is a limitation regarding the size of the password

and there is nothing in the manual or in any forums as well. So i tried my password

(which i knew to be 100 % correct) in single character steps from 1 to… 25!

My 56 character long password was simply cutted down to the first 25 characters

by Smartware or whatever…

Bing, Drive unlocked…

Well, don’t know if this was just a unique phenomen for my drive/software, but maybe

it helps other peeople with the same problem…

BTW.: To try so many password variations you should try max 4 passwords, disconnect

the drive from the USB port, wait 10 sec (just to be sure the disk spin down is complete),

reconnect the drive to your USB, 4 more tries… and so on… there is no limitation for

this way…

Regards

TronKS