


I know the password, I disabled the password when I first got it (just under a week ago) but when I turned my PC on a few hours ago it wasn’t showing up under “My Computer” and after swapping USB connections, restarting my PC, fiddling etc, it eventually was showing up as Locked. I have no experience with partitioned external drives, so I know not if this could suggest that they are actually two separate physical units (something "hacked" in the SATA-to-USB controller, maybe?) or it is just me unable to properly erase the hard drive and forget about that damn VCD.For some BIZARRE reason “My Book Essential 1TB” HDD is locked and wont unlock. One strange thing I noticed is that even when the drive is unmounted, I have the option to mount separately the virtual CD and the drive itself. I tried with both fdisk and parted, but I may have done something wrong. I connected that evil drive to my Ubuntu Server 14.04.

I opened Microsoft's System Registry utility to force-allow write on the protected media, and just when I was about to start partying, I realized I failed once again. with Windows, I launched HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, as somebody has claimed it to have had success, but I ended up with a "Device media is write-protected" error.

