Ask HN: How to lose 200+ GB of personal information :/ | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to lose 200+ GB of personal information :/

3 pointslostmyhdd12 comments

So I bought a new external hard drive (Western Digital Passport SE 750GB) about a week ago and I'm excited and all giddy to be able to transfer it from my old Western Digital Passport. I open up my folders to back up all of my personal data to the drive: documents, music, pictures and videos.

Lo and behold a pop-up referring to a virtual drive appears on my screen! It appears to be Western Digital's software called "SmartWare". I was like "Sigh... more bloatware that I don't want." I skimmed through the settings, configurations and the files to find a way to remove those programs from my external hard drive as I didn't want that annoying screen to be popping up every single time I plug it into a different computer.

I discovered that to remove it I had to install the bloatware then disable the VCD (Virtual CD drive). It asks me for a password. I enter in my usual with the prefix "wd", right? And it doesn't let me disable the VCD! So I removed the password in hopes that will make it work. But no, apparently, there was something running that was preventing the VCD from disabling. I promptly opened up task manager to see what it was and nothing was affecting it! But this is not where the problem starts. The problem starts when I restart my laptop in hopes to fix the problem. It didn't and it got worse.

I plugged in my external hard drive. This time no hard drive appeared. Only the VCD. So I opened up the VCD and it asks for me a password. I enter in my password and it doesn't work! "What the ... fuck!" At this point, I'm just blazing mad. On that hard drive contains my memories of friends, family, and all of my school work and games! What am I suppose to do?! EVERY SINGLE FILE THAT IS IMPORTANT TO ME IS ON THERE AND I CAN'T ACCESS IT. Frantically, I searched online for an answer. However, all I found was "you'll need WD's help. It's AES 256-bit military grade encryption" or "you'll need to reformat your drive."

Now I don't know what to do. I submitted an e-mail to the WD support team in hopes of help but if they don't do anything, I'm so screwed. Please help! I have no idea what I can do.

tl;dr my files are locked due to terrible external hard drive software.

Wait so, basically, you encrypted the single most important hard drive to you and didn't write down the password anywhere?

You'd think the software would, you know, make noises and flash big bright red lights at you before it let you do that ... ask fourty-two times whether you actually want it.

I'm guessing you also don't have a backup?

Well, hope you get it working somehow eh :)

I didn't forget the password. It's not accepting the password I created :(

What pisses me off the most is that I never wanted to use this bloatware! I just wanted it to store my files! I never asked for an annoying "Please set up security for you HDD and register your product!"

Hi. It's too late for that now, but next time you buy a drive, i suggest you look at the partitions table. Most hw companies now tend to include a tiny additional partition where the bloatware sits and waits (happens also on USB keys), so before doing any backup on your new drive, crush that table and create a shiny new unique partition. This can avoid later problems :)

It was a noob mistake :( I'm always formatting my drives before I use them now.

> I open up my folders to back up all of my personal data to the drive: documents, music, pictures and videos

It's not "backing up" if the data is only stored in one place.

Old hard drive->New hard drive->Laptop

I was only on the new hard drive part.

Just keep the dang thing unplugged until you hear back from WD. They have smart people there.

...and you still have your old Passport, right?

Indeed I do. However, I copied everything over to my new one then formated it and gave it to my brother for his birthday.

I should mention that I still have my receipt and I registered my HDD with them yesterday.

I just wrote you quite a long story, so in case you don't have the patience to read it all, here's my recommendation for you (as echoed again at the very end):

If you have no backup of your data, I recommend taking your drive to a special data recovery center. I think the data is still there, but they will need to physically remove the platters from the enclosure and place them in a new drive with a new circuit board. It will probably be quite expensive, but it sounds like it will be worth it for you.

Ok, now my similar story:

I had a remarkably similar thing happen to me a few months back so I can't remember exactly what happened, but basically it went like this:

15 years of life on old 750GB HD, wanted to transfer to new WD Passport 1TB. Plugged it into USB, also got annoyed by the pop-up software, tried disabling it, nothing. Didn't use the full-on encryption, but did use a password to access the drive (it was immediate, so I'm assuming no encryption actually took place).

Anyway, then I realized it was annoying to always have to enter the password whenever plugging in the drive, and in any event, I just didn't like the "feeling" of some weird third party software -- the WD pop-up software -- managing a password for my critical data.

So I elected to remove it. I don't remember whether I was successful, but what happened next was terrifying: I couldn't access my drive. Same as you, only the WD VCD software loaded but the drive itself wouldn't mount.

This was on a modern MacBook Pro running the latest version of OS X btw. So I immediately tried booting up into Windows, and even tried an actual Windows box as well. Weirdly, the Mac and Windows device managers were able to see SOMETHING there, but they couldn't access it.

The drive would spin up, but nothing else. Nada, zip.

So I immediately took the drive back to the Apple store, and one of the employees walked in and before I could even tell him what happened, he said, "Let me guess, your brand new WD drive just failed?"

Turns out they have a circuit board problem: after testing, they concluded mine had failed, and that apparently circuit board failures on those drives, if they happen at all, happen within the first 24 hours of use.

So then I faced a dilemma: how do I get my money back and get rid of all my data? There was no way to format the drive before sending it back, and I wasn't going to entrust 15 years or more of my life to some employee at WD somewhere to just physically destroy the drive.

Long story (not so) short, I elected to just swallow the $150 and keep the drive, i.e., keeping my personal data, well, personal, was worth $150 to me.

So I went out and bought a Seagate and just recopied my data.

As I said above, if you have no backup of your data, I recommend taking your drive to a special data recovery center. I think the data is still there, but they will need to physically remove the platters from the enclosure and place them in a new drive with a new circuit board. It will probably be quite expensive, but it sounds like it will be worth it for you.

So sorry for what you've been through, I know how it feels...... :(

Wow... that is exactly what happened to me. So now I have to spend $150 to save my data? :(

I am sure your data is worth at least $150 to you. But yeah, basically. Oh and, never again by a WD portable. I ended up getting a Seagate. So far, great.

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