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i took out my hard drive from my old macbook pro and want to use it as an external data storage. When I attach it to my iMac, it is asking me for a password. Unfortunately I no longer remember it. I've tried many old passwords, even tried the hint but nothing. Can this somehow be reset without losing the data? Thanks
Ray
iMac 21.5″, macOS 11.4
There is no way to get the data off the drive without first entering the password. The whole point of this is that the drive has been encrypted so that the only person who can access the data is you. This is a security feature and is not able to be bypassed. If it was able to be bypassed that easily then there really wouldn't be a point in even encrypting the data because someone could then just bypass it and get all the data off your drive. You are going to have to remember the password to be able to gain any access to the drive to get the data from it.
There is no way to get the data off the drive without first entering the password. The whole point of this is that the drive has been encrypted so that the only person who can access the data is you. This is a security feature and is not able to be bypassed. If it was able to be bypassed that easily then there really wouldn't be a point in even encrypting the data because someone could then just bypass it and get all the data off your drive. You are going to have to remember the password to be able to gain any access to the drive to get the data from it.
Did you save the Filevault Recovery Key as macOS recommended when you first enabled Filevault on the drive? You can use the Filevault recovery key to also unlock the volume. Otherwise you need to use the password used for one of the user accounts on that old drive to unlock it (assuming you only had to enter your password one time when you were booting the old computer).
You can reinstall the hard drive into the old laptop to reset the user account password using the instructions in this Apple article:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/reset-your-mac-login-password-mh35902/mac
trying to unlock a locked HDD
