Western Digital External Driver Error

OS Windows 7 Pro (x64)

Pretty sure this is an actual problem with the driver, but I have the only one up on the WD site. Here is my post from the WD forum that explains the issue:

https://community.wd.com/t/500-gb-my-book-mirror-dual-ses-driver-problem/188434

Thanks for any help on this one. Need to get some of these backups moved to a one stop for backup.

 

Thanks for the reply DavidGP. I'll try this and report back. I actually thought of it and popped myself on the forehead. No way can I get into this for now.

For the present time, I have a bunch of shares to set up so I can move backups over to the drive, and I don't want to interfere with my thinking on this. To kind of compound things, Windows seems to lose the drive(s) when the PC goes into sleep mode or is turned off. It's very strange. If I leave the unit plugged in when turning off the PC, BIOS will not even finish on restart. I see the initial manufacturer screen and then it just stays that. It doesn't show any options of any kind. Never have I ever seen that before. The USB mouse and keyboard also both cut out at the log in screen when the PC goes into sleep mode. As soon as I unplug the unit, it's like magic. At boot, the BIOS finishes, even if it was stopped, or at log in keyboard and mouse come right back. It's like this thing has the power to stop time whenever it wants to. But that's not all. So then when I plug the USB back in, the PC doesn't recognize the drive. The only workaround is to unplug the USB connector at the drive(s) unit. Then Windows actually sees the unit again. I think the unit relies on the WD/SES/monitoring tools software being in the system tray.

My main concern is that I cannot monitor that the one drive that I am copying to actually is being duplicated to the other. I'm about to take a look to see if everything finds the drive and maybe take a look at some other programs if not. The actual WD tray software requires the SES driver, and the driver simply either will not install or cannot get past Windows security measures about signatures or something. It does seem to be there in system32. There isn't anything in SysWOW which caused me to wonder, but I'm not much in the mood to experiment for now. Just want to get the backups onto a couple of fresh drives.

I'd like to have the tools in the program, but it looks like WD didn't bother to make the SES driver compatible with Windows 7 or maybe the driver's signature expired. The driver names indicate that there are even at least Windows 8 versions in the folder where they are located and some say pre windows 8. They are all installed with the WD Drive Utilities app into a folder there.

Again thanks for your assistance. Don't want to tempt fate for now. Not sure what this thing will do if I experiment too much.