WD My Passport - Unable to Erase External HDD

[Riftik]

Hi, I've recently found my old WD My Passport and when I've tried to access it, it has required a password. I've cannot remember the password and as far as I can tell by browsing online is that I need to erase the drive completely in order for it to work again as there is no facility for forgotten passwords. I'm OK with this and I've been trying to erase the drive however I've ran into some problems.

I first found out that WD has a utility called WD Drive Utilities that allows me to delete the drive completely and start out fresh. I downloaded and installed the program but once I connected my drive it wouldn't detect it and so I couldn't do anything. Here's the screen I was stuck on: http://prntscr.com/8a1mr7

After this I saw that I might be able to delete the partition or something in Disk Management but all I kept seeing was this: http://prntscr.com/8a1njq I realised that Disk 2 looked weird and wasn't initialized however when I right clicked or did anything there were no options on the drive that indicated deleting it etc.

This made me think that the drive was corrupt or something as I couldn't do anything and no software I downloaded (WD Utilities) was able to do anything about the drive. I tried command prompt and selected the disk and cleaned it. After this I tried to make a primary partition but I got a popup saying 'ERROR: Access Denied'. I'm really out of ideas on this one and all I want is the drive to be reset completely so I can start using it again. I don't care for the files on the HDD and I have no clue what to do now in order to reset the drive. Thank you for any feedback.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the community, Riftik!

I'm truly sorry to hear about your WD My Passport drive!
I'd recommend you to try testing the HDD's health and SMART data status by running both the QUICK and EXTENDED tests from the WD Data LifeGuard Diagnostic utility. Here's a link to the software: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=k484ty
This tool can also help you low-level format the drive (write zeros). The feature basically can fully erase the hard drive by writing zeros to all the sectors until it's completely wiped out. Here's a tutorial from our KB that might shed some light on the procedure: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=d30bCq

Hope it helps. Keep me posted!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Riftik]

Hi, thanks for the reply and really sorry for my late reply. I followed the instructions in the tutorial however I'm coming up with an error once I try to write zeros to the entire disk. Here's the error: http://prntscr.com/8emepu

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hi again, Riftik!

This seems rather unfortunate. Have you tried running the QUICK and EXTENDED tests from the utility as well? I'm afraid that your WD My Passport might be failing. I'd strongly recommend you to check the warranty of your WD drive here: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=9Zt2lr

It's going to be very helpful, if you can share the SMART results from the extended test as well.

Keep me posted!
SuperSoph_WD