The WD unlocker resides on an HPA set in the DCO. Mine has no password, but it still appears. I don’t understand why everyone is saying don’t set a password and it won’t appear. I am very protective of what gets installed and changed on my laptop, which has left me very disappointed with Western Digital after this last purchase.Īctually. I just hope that the software doesn’t amount to a root kit. Since it changed the behavior after uninstalling, I am left wondering what it has left on my system and changed? The Tier II tech support did tell me some WD Products that didn’t have their SmartWare on them, but none of them came in the 3 TB size.

It also changed the icon of my drive too. I did uninstall the WD SmartWare, and I noticed now when I unmount the WD Unlocker VCD, it stays unmounted and doesn’t remount. I consider this worse, because now their software is always running on my computer and it’s stuff I’ll never used. Plus, now I had the WD SmartWare always running on my computer and even placed an icon on my task bar. During the calls to WD, they had me install the WD SmartWare, against a lot of protest, but it had an option to hide the Virtual CD temporary, but a reboot or remounting the drive caused the Unlocker to appear on my desktop again. It will always be there as long as the drive is connected to my computer. After calling WD Tech Support and getting escalated to Tier II, I was told that I have the “Mini” Virtual CD, and there is no way to disable this.

I found a KB article that talks about removing it, but it didn’t work. I bought a My Book Essentials for home use, and it always puts the WD Unlocker on my desktop. If you do have a password set, you won’t be able to unlock the drive without installing the SES driver – all you’d be able to do is remove the password from the drive at home and try again. If you don’t have a password set, you should just be able to skip the SES driver. It seems much more likely that it’s the SES driver of which the school is blocking the installation.

RG’s PC, doesn’t show up when plugged into the WDTV, doesn’t show up when plugged into the WDTV Live. That’s the way it works for me… the hidden Smartware VCD doesn’t show up on this PC, doesn’t show up when plugged into the Server, doesn’t show up when plugged into Mrs. If it’s a Smartware VCD, then if you install the firmware patch to hide the VCD, it should stay hidden for all devices the drive is attached to. WD can’t force the school to install the Unlocker application on their computers. If the school PC’s won’t allow the Unlocker application to run, all you can do is remove the password from the drive. The Unlocker VCD remains hidden unless you set a password, and hides itself again when you remove a password, but it cannot be removed from the drive. Is it a “WD Unlocker” VCD or a “WD Smartware” VCD?

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