Nov 09, 2019 Then uninstall the WD software by following the manufacturer's instructions. Now use Disk Utility to erase the WD drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended (Journaled) if you are only using it on a Mac or as GUID partition and ExFAT if you will share it with a Windows computer. Now move all your files back to the WD drive. Compatible with Apple Time Machine —Works with your Mac right out of the box. Verify that the My Passport drive appears under DEVICES in the Sidebar area of your Finder display. If you want to create a password to secure your backup files, select the Encrypt Backup Disk check box.

Nov 13, 2020 • Filed to: Answer Hard Drive Problems • Proven solutions

In the internet era, people are facing with information transparency and convenience. We enjoy the benefits that era brings while we also become victims of privacy loss. For security, people tend to set a password on the computer and hard drive to prevent confidential information from being stolen.

However, we will be trapped in a plight when we forgot our password. And according to Q&A research, there are quite a few methods to retrieve the power-on password, while it is not easy to unlock a locked hard drive if without a password. Don't be desperate! This article shows you how to unlock a hard drive and how to restore data from a hard drive.

How to Unlock Hard Drive with Password?

1. How to Encrypt a Hard Drive?

A hard drive with password protection must be a securer location for information storage. Follow the three simple steps to encrypt your hard drive.

Step 1Search 'Control Panel' to 'Bitlocker Drive Encryption'.

Step 2Turn on 'Bitlocker'.

Step 3Enter the password to finish encryption.

Now you have successfully set a password on your hard drive, what if forget the hard drive password? Let's move on to the content of unlocking the password.

2. How to Remove Hard Drive Password?

The priority may be that you come to a professional technician for help, and some tell you it cannot be fixed, you need a brand new hard drive. While others ask for charges. If the budget is affordable, it is advised that you get someone else to fix the problem. It will be time and energy-efficient.

However, if you want to have a great trial to fix it by yourself, just follow me.

Step 1Press 'Win+R' to arouse 'Run' interface

Step 2Input 'compmgmt.msc' to 'Computer Management' interface

Step 3Choose the locked drive to perform a quick 'Format'

During the formatting process, three notices will jump out:

• Back up your data before the format
• All your data will be wiped out
• Your BitLocker will be erased

After checking the notices, you might insist that there are very important data stored on the drive. Then you will be facing another problem: How to recover the erased data?

Don't worry, there does have an effective and efficient method. Let's explore it together!

How to Recover Data from Hard Drive

After you removed the password, you can have access to your hard drive data. If some data has been lost, you can recover data from the hard drive with hard drive data recovery software. Recoverit data recovery is a safe and effective hard drive recovery software, retrieves your lost videos, photos, music, documents, emails, etc. from your computer hard drive as well as from USB drives, external hard drives, and other storage devices.

3 Steps to Restore Data from Hard Drive Without Password

How To Unlock Pdf Mac

To recover data from a hard disk, you need to download and install the hard drive recovery software, and then follow the next simple steps. If your hard drive is an external device, please connect it to your computer in advance.

Step 1 Select a hard drive

When you run Recoverit, it will show you a list of the hard disks detected or connected to your computer. Here, you should select the password-protected hard drive, and click 'Start' to go on.

Step 2 Scan the hard drive

The recovery software will start scanning your locked hard drive to make all the hidden, inaccessible, or lost data visible. Wait for a while and you can get the scanning results.

Step 3 Recover hard drive data

After the scan completes, you can preview different types of files like images, videos, audios, documents, and many more. Click 'Recover' and save them to a safe storage device.

Just in 3 steps, you're able to retrieve data lost, deleted, hidden, or locked from a hard drive. All you need is just Recoverit Data Recovery, a data rescue program working on Windows and Mac computer.

Tutorial: How to Recover Data from External Hard Drive?

What's Wrong with Drive

Recover Your Drive

Fix Your Drive

Format/Wipe Drive

Know Your Drive

Summary: This guide introduces three common scenarios in which you might find your WD My Passport external hard drive read-only on Mac. If the WD My Passport read-only on Mac problem is caused by the NTFS file system, installing iBoysoft NTFS for Mac to edit, rename, delete the saved files and transfer files to the read-only WD My passport hard drive.

Western Digital is one of the most popular hard drive manufacturers. Its product line covers WD My Passport, WD My Passport Ultra, WD My Book, WD Elements, WD My Passport for Mac and more. Among those external hard drive categories, WD My Passport external hard drives are the most widely used ones. However, many users complain their WD My Passport is read-only on Mac like the user below in WD community.

'I have a WD My Passport 320GB external hard drive that I am trying to hook up to my iMac for the first time. I'm running macOS 10.13. I'm extremely frustrated because this drive is in a read-only mode, and I can't figure out how to change it! Any suggestion to fix this?'

Please continue reading and look for solutions for solving read-only WD My Passport on Mac problem.

Why is the WD My Passport read-only?

Sometimes, the WD external hard drive is read-only on Mac when you just got a brand new WD external hard drive. In other times, it suddenly became read-only after you have been using it for a while. The most common reasons for a read-only WD external hard drive, like WD My Passport, are listed below:

• 1. Your WD My Passport hard drive is NTFS-formatted
• 2. You have read-only permission to access WD My Passport hard drive
• 3. Your WD My Passport hard drive is corrupted

If you are not sure which reason has caused your WD My Passport external hard drive read-only on Mac, check the scenarios one by one. If you know the reason already, you can jump to the scenario that best describes your situation.

Scenario 1: Your WD My Passport hard drive is NTFS-formatted

For WD My Passport Ultra and WD Elements, check if the hard drive is formatted with NTFS file system. By default, macOS can mount a Windows NTFS volume or drive in read-only mode. You can view the files saved on the NTFS-formatted partition or drive but can't make any changes to them. In addition, the WD My Passport hard drive won't let you add any files to it. To check if your WD My Passport is NTFS formatted, follow the steps:

• 1. Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utilities.
• 2. Click the WD My Passport (you may have changed its name) at the left sidebar. The file system information will be displayed on the right.

Note: You can also right-click the disk icon at the desktop and choose 'Get Info' to check the file system information.

After having confirmed that the WD My Passport is formatted with NTFS, many people will choose to convert NTFS to APFS (for macOS Catalina, Mojave and High Sierra) or reformat the WD My Passport hard drive to make the WD external hard drive compatible with Mac. But as you know, directly formatting WD Elements or My Passport on Mac causes data loss.

In fact, installing an NTFS for Mac driver is a much easier way.

Solution: Install an NTFS for Mac driver to make WD My Passport writable

The NTFS drivers for macOS - iBoysoft NTFS for Mac can help you read and write to NTFS-formatted WD My Passport drives on Mac.

iBoysoft NTFS for Mac: NTFS for Mac driver and more

iBoysoft NTFS for Mac is an NTFS disk management tool. It can manage NTFS drives with NTFS write support. It can easily and effectively mount NTFS drive on Mac automatically in read-write mode. It works with macOS 11/10.15/10.14/10.13.

Three simple steps to read and write to NTFS-formatted WD My Passport drive easily.

• 1. Download, install, and launch iBoysoft NTFS for Mac on your Mac. Then, restart your Mac.
• 2. Connect the NTFS-formatted WD My Passport drive to Mac.
• 3. Write to NTFS-formatted WD My Passport drive after the drive has been mounted successfully.

Besides an NTFS mounter, iBoysoft NTFS for Mac can also open, unmount, eject, erase and repair NTFS volumes. It can list all attached external disks including USB flash drives, SD cards, memory sticks, external hard drives and so on. You can open them with one click. Moreover, you can reformat them to NTFS with iBoysoft NTFS for Mac if you need.

Scenario 2: You have read-only permission to access the WD My Passport hard drive

If your WD My Passport external hard drive is not formatted with NTFS but you have no write permission to it, it is probably because you have read-only permission to access the WD My Passport. Since your WD external hard drive is write-protected, all your write access is denied.

To know your permission to the WD My Passport, follow the steps below:

• 1. Right-click the WD My Passport disk icon at the desktop and choose 'Get Info'.
• 2. Check the information at the bottom under the Sharing & Permissions tab.

If you can see the message 'You can only read', then you will understand why you can't write to your WD My Passport drive.

Solution: Change read-only permission on the WD My Passport drive

Follow the instruction below to change permission on Mac so that you can access the WD My Passport again:

• 1. Click on the lock icon at the right corner in the Get Info window.
• 2. Enter password if asked.
• 3. Check the 'Ignore ownership on this volume'.
• 4. Click on the gear button and choose 'Apply to enclosed items…'.
• 5. Click 'OK' when you are asked to confirm the operation.
• 6. Click the 'Read Only' in Privilege column and select 'Read & Write'.

By now, you have regained the read and write access to the WD My Passport.

Scenario 3: Your WD My Passport hard drive is corrupted

How To Unlock Mac Files On My Passport For Mac Free

If you are sure that the read-only WD My Passport is not caused by NTFS file system nor read-only permission, another possible cause might be the disk corruption. When an external drive is corrupted, people suddenly have trouble reading or/and writing to the disk. Then you will have to fix the corrupted WD My Passport external hard drive to make it writable again. We will introduce two solutions here:

How To Unlock Mac Files On My Passport For Mac Os

• Fix the read-only WD My Passport in Disk Utility on Mac
• Reformat the WD My Passport on Mac

Solution 1: Fix the read-only WD My Passport in Disk Utility on Mac

This solution might help you solve the read-only external hard drive problem without formatting. You will utilize a built-in tool on Mac called Disk Utility. It is used to manage internal and external disks on Mac. There is a function called First Aid in Disk Utility that can be used to check for and repair errors on the selected disk or volume.

Here is how to fix the read-only WD My Passport in Disk Utility:

• 1. Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
• 2. Select the WD My Passport drive at the left sidebar.
• 3. Click on First Aid and click on 'Run' to repair the WD My Passport drive.
• 4. Click 'Done' after the operation completes.

If First Aid fails to repair the WD external hard drive, your disk might be seriously corrupted. You will have to reformat the WD My passport to make it not read-only.

Solution 2: Reformat the WD My Passport for Mac

Reformatting the corrupted WD My Passport drive is the ultimate solution for fixing the read only file system on Mac. Follow the steps below to know how to make the WD My Passport compatible with Mac and PC.

• 1. Make sure you have a copy of your important files on WD My Passport hard drive, or recover lost data from the external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
• 2. Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
• 3. Click on the WD My Passport drive at the left sidebar.
• 4. Check Click 'Erase' on the top of the Disk Utility window.
• 5. Input a name.
• 6. Choose FAT or exFAT as format for convenience because either of them is compatible with both Windows and macOS. Then, how to format the WD My Passport for Mac exclusive use? Simply choose APFS or Mac OS Extend format in Disk Utility, which also works if you want to format WD Elements for Mac.
• 7. Choose 'GUID Partition Map' as Scheme.
• 8. Click on 'Erase' button.

You can reconnect the WD external hard drive to Mac again to see if it is writable now.

Conclusion

The external hard drive read-only on Mac problem doesn't happen to WD external hard drives only. Any external hard drive could be write-protected on Mac. It is quite common to see other notable external hard drive brand get the same complaint like Seagate, Samsung, Toshiba, etc. When you come across the read-only disk problem on Mac, the post is always helpful.