WD external hard drive not detected

I am a beginner in Ubuntu. And I have just installed Ubuntu 11.10 in my Dell laptop. When I plugged my WD external hard drive in, it read the first time, but since I have a unlock.exe file (password for the hard drive). So I installed Wine to read it. But it gives me an error. I restart the machine, and plugged the hard drive in again. And it is not recognized anymore. Can anybody help me, please?

Thank you!

According to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1672368&page=2

WD Passport needs to be unlocked using Windows or Mac before they can be used. Take the drive to a Mac or PC and run the Unlock application or the WD Smartware Utilities to enable access to the writable partition, then format it. If the drive is missing the unlocking apps, you can download the software kit for Mac and PC from WD's support pages.

In an extreme situation you can use http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/howto/ I don't know if they can be trusted. As you can see HDDs could be simply unlocked using these tools, so to be safe encrypt your data yourself before storing it on your drive.

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I just asked people at WD, they said there is no way you can unlock from any Linux distribution, including Ubuntu, not even wine can do that.

First you have to disable the unlock.exe while you're in windows. Use the WD smartware program (you can dl it from their website), go to settings, enter your passoword, choose "remove security," and then update settings. Now it doesn't have a password anymore, so you should at least be able to mount and access it in linux.