What's New:

The SES driver is not required for your drive to be recognized by your computer. If your drive is not recognized please see Answer ID 1708: I cannot find drivers for my WD drive and/or my Operating System fails to recognize my WD drive.

The SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) driver is different from the Virtual CD, and the WD SmartWare software. To access many of the optional features of your drive, you will be required to install both the SES driver, and the WD SmartWare software. If you wish to use the drive as a simple hard drive and do not require access to the advanced features of the drive, you can hide the VCD by following Answer ID 3835: How to disable (hide) the Virtual CD (VCD) for Windows or Mac OSX on a My Book or My Passport drive . Western Digital still recommends installing the SES driver when not using WD SmartWare, but the drive will function without it. The prompts to install the driver are part of the Windows Operating system and will always occur when connecting a drive to a Windows PC without the driver installed.

You can download a copy of the SES driver from our knowledge base. For assistance doing this please see Answer ID 5419: WD SES driver download and instructions for recovering the WD SmartWare installer.

Problem:

Windows attempts to install a driver called the SES Driver every time I connect the drive to a computer. What is this driver, why is it required and how can I get rid of the repeated prompts to install the driver?

Cause:

Your new Western Digital My Passport/My Book hard drive requires a special communications channel (SCSI) between your PC and the drive to enable certain features such as password protection, LED control, and access to the drives label if applicable.

At install, the Windows operating system detects this SCSI communications channel and attempts to install a SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) driver. This driver is only used by your hard drive and is installed by default when you first attach the drive to a computer.

However if you did not install the driver upon first install and chose not to install WD Smartware, Windows will continue to prompt you to install the driver each time you connect the drive to a computer. This will continue to occur unless the SES driver is installed.

Solution:

We recommend that you install the driver by selecting the Install the software automatically option on the popup screen. Windows will automatically find the Windows SES driver online, and the prompting will disappear. This will not affect your operating system negatively in any way. If Windows is unable to find the driver you can download a copy of the driver from Answer ID 5419: WD SES driver download and instructions for recovering the WD SmartWare installer.