i have recently purchased a 1TB My passport essential SE and i am unable to install the drivers.
every time the new hardware wizard starts i direct it to the extras and driver folder and it finds the drivers begins to copy them to system32 etc. and before it finishes i get an error saying it was unable to finish the installation … image attached.
i also get a similar response when attempting to install the drivers through the software on the drive.
the drive still works and i can move files to and from it but i am unable to start my laptop with it attached and it has cause my laptop to have issues booting up. and the constant new hardware installation wizard popping up is extremely annoying. any help would be appreciated. thank you
The WD SES driver should install without issue. You might want to try installing using Windows Update. This contains the same driver that’s included with the drive, but the different installation method might make a difference. While the drive will work fine without the driver, you may have a more serious issue with your computer that might be worth looking into. The SES driver helps SmartWare monitor your drive health, temperature, and so forth.
If all else fails, you can go into device manager, find the WD SES device, and disable the WD SES device, which will keep the New Hardwaer Found Wizard from popping up.
The booting problem is simply that your laptop is trying to boot from a CD-ROM drive before your internal hard drive and it is finding the Passport’s Virtual CD. You can fix that either by entering your BIOS setup during bootup and changing your boot priority to look at your internal drive before any CD drives. Alternatively, as long as you do not have a password set on your drive you can use SmartWare to disable the Virtual CD on the Passport.
