I wanted to post this in case anyone was having the same problem as me. When prompted by SmartWare, I downloaded the latest firmware update (WDFirmwareUpdater.zip) for the MyBook 3TB hard drive. I extracted the WDFirmwareUpdater.exe and ran it and received a dialog stating “The application has encountered an unexpected error and is now exiting”. After troubleshooting and reinstalling the SES driver and reinstalling the drive, I was still receiving this error.
When I went back to the WDFirmwareUpdater.zip file, I noticed that there was a directory named “Ref” in the zip file as well. When I unzipped that directory into the same location as the WDFirmwareUpdater.exe, the update ran with no errors.
I know this seems like a dumb mistake to make but it cost me a lot of time and hopefully this post will save others time in the future.
