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WD My Passport Essential WDBAAA5000ABK - keeps asking for a password.  #44

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@stynoo

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Long story short: a friend lost access to her trusty portable drive and here we are.

Steps I took:

  1. (windows) from disk management, no partitions detected and asking to put a new label on the disk to make it usable. (hell no)
  2. (windows) WD tools (WD Security & WD Drive Utilities) are asking for a password to unlock the drive. My friend ensures she never put a password and was using the drive like this for a long time.
  3. (linux) tried to ddrescue over USB: I/O error - access denied on all sectors
  4. start reading (whoa, data recovery is something else!)
  5. (linux) tried to use HDDSuperTool over the USB interface - nothing works, not even drive detection

At this point I call my friend and explains her that she - or needs a professional firm to look at this - or yolo and hope for the best. She tells me to go ahead as the data is important but not worth the money.

  1. Soldered a sata interface on the disk and disabled the usb interface.
  2. (linux) drive is detected, HDDSuperTool shows only a master password and no user password, ddrescue creates a full dump.
  3. (windows) R-Studio does not detect anything on the image, the data must be encrypted, start reading again.
  4. (linux) use reallymine to try to decrypt the image and it asks me again for a password.

What would be the next logical step?

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