New
#21
If I might start by clarifying a couple points
1. The SES driver is only required if you want to uses WD's "extended" functionality for their USB drive. It's not needed if you want to use a WD drive as a standard USB disk
2. USB Mass Storage and MTP device are different devices (by definition) and use different drivers.
> USB Disks and CD/DVDs are USB Mass Storage devices
> A camera or phone may have an option to look like a USB disk or an MTP device. Each option uses a different set of drivers. A USB device might be able to look like one or the other but not both at the same time. MTP doesn't use the USB Mass Storage driver
@Detrolord
Go to device Manager, right click the problem USB Mass Storage device, select Properties, click the Driver tab then Driver Details button
You'll see a set of driver files. Do you see more then one? Click each file to see if it is digitally signed or not. Report any file which isn't signed
I believe that's your problem ("not digitally signed" was Windows error message complaint for the device :) )
Either the .sys file is corrupt and/or you're missing the .cat file that provides the driver's signature. In either case, will have to follow up with you a bit later
Oh. One quick question: I may have missed it earlier but are you running 32 or 64 bit Win 7?
Instead of fighting with the laptop that may have a bad usb port, or corrupted usb stack, I would take out the hard drive and put it in an enclosure and make it a portable hard drive (< $10 for a cheap usb2 hard drive enclosure). Plug it in to any of the 5 computers that does read from usb external hard drive, and back up the data that way. Wouldn't take 4 hours.
First, a recommendation: Turn off the Folder Option that hides file extensions. I find it only makes it more confusing and easier to misidentify files and their file type. CtlPnl->Folder Options->View. Scroll down and uncheck the box to hide file extensions for well known file types.
Next, I'm curious... do these two files currently exist? C:\Windows\inf\usbstor.inf and C:\Windows\inf\usbstor.pnf
Next, run the DriveCleanup Tool.
Next, we'll try to recover files from your Windows FileRepository.
> Look in C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository
> Find and open the most recent folder (there may be more then one) whose name starts usbstor_inf
> Copy files usbstor.inf and usbstor.pnf to the Windows\inf directory
> Copy usbstor.sys to Windows\system32\drivers directory
> Delete the INFCACHE.1 file as you did before
> Reboot your machine
Try connecting the drive again
/* EDIT */
Added instruction to run DriveCleanup Tool
These were the two crucial files that were missing on some other user's PC with the identical problem.
I made mention of this up in post #4 above, in which I provided a link to the web article on this identical problem for another user of failing to properly recognize the same WD drive exactly as OP in this current thread:
"The user still had problems, and discovered that USBSTOR.INF and USBSTOR.PNF were somehow missing, as described by this other article. "