I regularly use my WD drive to reimage computers in the field. This works hand in hand with either a bootable CD or USB flash drive to boot with WinPE. So far, this has worked fine for keeping the WD drive locked. Now that UEFI bootable devices are becoming mandatory the boot media used has to be 64bit. After extended testing with UEFI bootable, we found that the 32bit unlock executable will not run in the 64bit WinPE. If I am going to continue to use WD devices to reimage computers in the field, it will require me to have the 64bit version of the unlock executable. Otherwise, I have to find another device or 3d party solution. If I have to do that, there isn’t any sense in spending more money on the WD solution that has encryption that I can’t use.
Idea submitted.
18 months on and still no 64 bit unlock utility. Why is this important for general users as well as tech support people ?
A key marketing feature of the WD My Passport is it’s built-in hardware encryption. As travelling users, we like to know that our portable HDD data is protected if it is stolen. We also know that we are at risk of being infected with various malware and we don’t want to spend the time cleaning our laptop while we are travelling (be it for work or for holidays). So we want to keep our system image recovery files on our portable HDD.
However, our portable HDD is rendered useless if we can’t get access to the drive when using Windows system recovery tools.
Windows system imaging and recovery tools are available from a variety of developers and are very easy for non-technical people to use. New PCs these days come with UEFI (not BIOS) and a 64 bit operating system, and that means we need to use the Microsoft 64 bit Windows PE tools for the system recovery. In this environment, the virtual CD drive is accessable, but the 32 bit Unlock utility will not run.
The Microsoft documentation states that UEFI systems running a 64 bit operating system can ONLY run 64 bit software in the PE recovery environment. This is the reason that the current 32 bit WD Unlock utility will not run.
I understand that it should take little effort to recompile the unlock utility as a 64 bit program, and so do not understand why this has not yet been done.
