I have a Western Digital 4TB hard drive, and everything has been going well until recently where I had to move a computer from one room to the next. Everything was turned off and then unplugged to be moved. I plugged it all back in, turned it all back on, and then suddenly it’s locked me out. I also previously before putting any data on it (this was months ago now) formatted it to be ext4 for internal use with my computer (Arch btw). Now a thing pops up in Removable Devices called WD Unlocker. I looked for everything to help me. I even plugged it into a Windows computer I had lying around to use the tool. I never put a password on it, so the tutorials were kind of useless and despite running the unlocker .exe it still won’t let me access anything on it. The error message I get at the top of Dolphin says an error occurred while accessing mydrive, the system responded: an unspecified error has occurred. Did not recieve reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. I was able to get access to some files somehow like 2 days ago, but now I’m dealing with the same issue, regardless of booting the computer, and cycling on and off, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix this. I even tried using a partition manager to see what was up, but it either loads in days amounts of time, or will pull up but not show what could be causing this since I didn’t expect any software to be active on it since originally formatting. Please help me. I don’t want to lose almost 4TB of stuff just because it’s acting stupid on me. I feel like I’ve tried everything, and the only other answer from looking things up I’ve gotten was that WD drives are stupid as hell for this specific reason. I’m at my wits end.


You should update your post with the actual model of enclosure you are using, you mentioned it’s a Western Digital 4TB but what’s the model? Maybe you’re referring to a My Passport Ultra 4TB (?) since those have encryption but that’s just a guess.
How easy is it to remove the hard drive from the enclosure and install it into something else for testing? If feasible could be a first step to determine if it’s an issue with the drive enclosure vs the drive itself. (keep in mind I’m asking without knowing anything about the enclosure you’re using so it may/may not be doable)
Is the entire thing plugged into the computer via USB cable? Try swapping USB cables just to rule out a cable issue, maybe it wasn’t that great and you moving it around made it worse.
Do you know what type of drive is inside the drive enclosure? e.g. a 2.5/3.5 HDD, or a 2.5 SSD, or a M.2 SSD stick.
If it’s a regular HDD, not SSD, then it’s possible you accidentally moved the drive enclosure before the drives actually finished spinning down during power off. I’ve lost a external drive that way.
WD Drive Plus, portable HDD. Model no.: WDBZC0040BBK-WEWM. This does have 256-bit encryption, but I also never set up any password or anything as I mentioned earlier. It was exfat when I bought it and changed it to ext4 so I could use it on my Arch computer. Haven’t had any issues til about a little less than a week ago now. I also always make sure nothing is moving or making sounds, etc. before I unplug and move things. No visible exterior damage, and nothing tinking around internally.