You'll find dozens of posts like yours here. More on google.
It all comes down to this. You need to use something more relible than what they supplied. In fact, why the password on this? One can lock the drive up physically so adding a password layer to backup can be argued to be "something else that will go wrong."
Bob
We were trying to use our Maxtor external harddrive on my iBook (OS X 10.4.7) this morning, for some reason it has never been recognizable to this computer even though it worked perfectly on the Powerbook. After an unsuccessful install attempt (yes, we went online for the Maxtor download) we could not get into the harddrive on either computer due to the password being wiped out. Not only was the password unrecognized but the security "question" was different from the one originally set, rendering that option useless. We called Maxtor twice - at first the technician had us reinstall, restart and try the password again. When this didn't work he said that there are sometimes password glitches but to keep trying on our own. We did this for two hours to no avail so I called again, this time I was told there are no glitches, nothing we did could have erased this information and that basically we could try recovering the files with a program but otherwise we are out of luck. Does anyone have any suggestions? Any theories? Has this happened before?

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