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curiouswebsterFlag for United States of America

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Need to open a hard disk on a Mac

I have an old external hard drive where I put the label "password fails" a few years ago. When I enter a password that's clearly wrong, the click Unlock, the window shake side to side. When I enter the probable password, the pw window changes, the vanishes.

The disk could have been formatted with Windows, but I am not sure about that.

The I use Mac El Capitan currently, but have access to a Windows 7 machine.

Do I have any options?

Thanks
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Jackie Man
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Can you post a photo of the hard-disk and give more details on brand and model?

Password can mean software or hardware encryption or just a software lock. If it is hardware one, you are out of luck for sure.
How is it listed in DISKMGMT.MSC on the Windows PC?
It should show as having a partition and a partition type.
If this is the native SATA security unlock password that locks the drive from the BIOS then you could have a bigger problem.

The unlock mechanism is clearly working, but your HDD could have had a catastrophic media failure that renders all data unreadable.

I would confirm that the disk is even readable by ..
1. unlock the drive.
2. leave power on (because power-off locks the hardware mechanism, as long as unlocked drive stays powered, then it doesn't matter what O/S uses the drive).
3. Boot the system to LINUX, or attach the drive to a LINUX machine, and then run one of the freebie partition managers.  See if it can read the disk and report partitioning information.  If it sees partitions then the TYPE of partition will tell you how it is partitioned.  If you see NTFS then clearly it is windows formatted.  If you see no partitions or read errors, then you are screwed.  (If you move  it to another system, then that is fine, just make sure it stays powered up)
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I opened Windows to tried to connect the drive, but found every password I tried caused the password window to shake side-to-side.

Attached is the pop-up about the drive...

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Jackie Man
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I can connect it to the Mac, no problem. But I do not need the drive, I need what's ON the drive.

How do I use the LAN interface?

Will that skip the password check? I do not think I used whole disk encryption at the time...
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I ran DISKMGMT.MSC from Windows and here is the view...

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Also, from the Mac, I found no applications folder:

Applications > GoFlex Home Desktop Applications

Could this be the problem?

Shall I install this?
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here is the result of sudo mount:

/dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
localhost:/Hb_CjrBq3RM7gPFRGJ_Pjt on /Volumes/MobileBackups (mtmfs, nosuid, read-only, nobrowse)
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thanks