External USB drives insists on installing drivers EVERY TIME.

This is an older XP laptop with SP3. I bought two Western Digital
external USB 1 TB hard drives, called "My Passport". Every time I plug
them in, they start "Installing New Hardware", and want me to go online
for drivers, and so on. (This computer is NOT connected to the internet,
except when I am at a WIFI).

I have used these drives repeatedly, and each time I have to go thru
this process, then click cancel, and after that, the drive works fine.

You'd think that since the drive works fine, this annoyance would stop.

How do I stop it?

* These drives did come with some installed software, which may contain
the drivers, but along with them, is a bunch of other crap that is
supposed to be installed, including but not limited to some backup
program, Adobe Acrobat (which I dont want), and other garbage which
likely contains tracking spyware and who knows what else....

Is there any way to stop these drives from demanding drivers, when in
fact they work fine without any additional drivers?

*Note: I have several other smaller USB harddrives that do not do this.
I never installed drivers for them, they just worked right out of the
box. Those range from 250gb to 650gb.

wrote:
This is an older XP laptop with SP3. I bought two Western Digital
external USB 1 TB hard drives, called "My Passport". Every time I plug
them in, they start "Installing New Hardware", and want me to go online
for drivers, and so on. (This computer is NOT connected to the internet,
except when I am at a WIFI).

I have used these drives repeatedly, and each time I have to go thru
this process, then click cancel, and after that, the drive works fine.

You'd think that since the drive works fine, this annoyance would stop.

How do I stop it?

* These drives did come with some installed software, which may contain
the drivers, but along with them, is a bunch of other crap that is
supposed to be installed, including but not limited to some backup
program, Adobe Acrobat (which I dont want), and other garbage which
likely contains tracking spyware and who knows what else....

Is there any way to stop these drives from demanding drivers, when in
fact they work fine without any additional drivers?

*Note: I have several other smaller USB harddrives that do not do this.
I never installed drivers for them, they just worked right out of the
box. Those range from 250gb to 650gb.



Some USB storage devices are "composite". That means, the USB hardware
hides two "items" inside, that the USB stack can sense. For example

USB_connector ---- "fake" CDROM drive with Autorun
---- actual HDD for storage

If you can manage to totally disable autoplay and autorun
in the OS, you may be able to manage it. The Microsoft
"disabler" for such things, continues to honor "fake"
CDROM drives, which is a shame. Someone else made
a registry change, that basically says to the OS
that it should *not* run an autorun.inf ever again.
And that one stops everything.

*******

Now, it might be some other effect doing it, so there are no
guarantees with the above idea... USB devices that lack
serial numbers for example, can exhibit that behavior.
But the chances are indeed slim, that a device purchased
in 2017, is still broken like that. I'm only tossing out
that idea, to show there are more root causes possible.

Paul

On 4/26/2017 2:40 PM, Paul wrote:
wrote:
This is an older XP laptop with SP3. I bought two Western Digital
external USB 1 TB hard drives, called "My Passport". Every time I plug
them in, they start "Installing New Hardware", and want me to go online
for drivers, and so on. (This computer is NOT connected to the internet,
except when I am at a WIFI).
I have used these drives repeatedly, and each time I have to go thru
this process, then click cancel, and after that, the drive works fine.
You'd think that since the drive works fine, this annoyance would stop.
How do I stop it?

* These drives did come with some installed software, which may contain
the drivers, but along with them, is a bunch of other crap that is
supposed to be installed, including but not limited to some backup
program, Adobe Acrobat (which I dont want), and other garbage which
likely contains tracking spyware and who knows what else....

Is there any way to stop these drives from demanding drivers, when in
fact they work fine without any additional drivers?
*Note: I have several other smaller USB harddrives that do not do this.
I never installed drivers for them, they just worked right out of the
box. Those range from 250gb to 650gb.



Some USB storage devices are "composite". That means, the USB hardware
hides two "items" inside, that the USB stack can sense. For example

USB_connector ---- "fake" CDROM drive with Autorun
---- actual HDD for storage

If you can manage to totally disable autoplay and autorun
in the OS, you may be able to manage it. The Microsoft
"disabler" for such things, continues to honor "fake"
CDROM drives, which is a shame. Someone else made
a registry change, that basically says to the OS
that it should *not* run an autorun.inf ever again.
And that one stops everything.

*******

Now, it might be some other effect doing it, so there are no
guarantees with the above idea... USB devices that lack
serial numbers for example, can exhibit that behavior.
But the chances are indeed slim, that a device purchased
in 2017, is still broken like that. I'm only tossing out
that idea, to show there are more root causes possible.

Paul
Look at what's on the drive.
If there's an autorun.inf file in the root directory, rename it.

mike wrote:

Look at what's on the drive.
If there's an autorun.inf file in the root directory, rename it.

You can't. The CDROM section is read-only. It's
designed to be a user-unfriendly PITA.

Similar kinds of things happened with USB U3 sticks.

Some of these things, there is a kind of "disable"
software, but generally, the tools do not actually
remove the fake CDROM section.

When shopping for USB materials, I'm very careful
to review the "features" a product may have. Whether
it's encryption, whizzy this or that, most of the time
I have to reject random purchases, because of the
unfriendly features. This leaves fewer noteworthy
items, that won't bite me later if I buy them. So
far I've been pretty lucky. I don't think any
key here supports encryption, or has a fake CDROM
in it. I just want plain storage, and that's it.

Paul

On 04/26/2017 02:04 PM, wrote:
This is an older XP laptop with SP3. I bought two Western Digital
external USB 1 TB hard drives, called "My Passport". Every time I plug
them in, they start "Installing New Hardware", and want me to go online
for drivers, and so on. (This computer is NOT connected to the internet,
except when I am at a WIFI).

I have used these drives repeatedly, and each time I have to go thru
this process, then click cancel, and after that, the drive works fine.

You'd think that since the drive works fine, this annoyance would stop.

How do I stop it?

* These drives did come with some installed software, which may contain
the drivers, but along with them, is a bunch of other crap that is
supposed to be installed, including but not limited to some backup
program, Adobe Acrobat (which I dont want), and other garbage which
likely contains tracking spyware and who knows what else....

Is there any way to stop these drives from demanding drivers, when in
fact they work fine without any additional drivers?

*Note: I have several other smaller USB harddrives that do not do this.
I never installed drivers for them, they just worked right out of the
box. Those range from 250gb to 650gb.





It will keep doing that unless you continue to let it go through the
whole process. next time don't cancel

On Wed, 26 Apr 2017 20:17:44 -0400, Paul wrote:

mike wrote:

Look at what's on the drive.
If there's an autorun.inf file in the root directory, rename it.

You can't. The CDROM section is read-only. It's
designed to be a user-unfriendly PITA.

Similar kinds of things happened with USB U3 sticks.

Some of these things, there is a kind of "disable"
software, but generally, the tools do not actually
remove the fake CDROM section.

When shopping for USB materials, I'm very careful
to review the "features" a product may have. Whether
it's encryption, whizzy this or that, most of the time
I have to reject random purchases, because of the
unfriendly features. This leaves fewer noteworthy
items, that won't bite me later if I buy them. So
far I've been pretty lucky. I don't think any
key here supports encryption, or has a fake CDROM
in it. I just want plain storage, and that's it.

Paul

One of the first things I do on any computer when I install the OS for
the first time, is to disable "Autorun" for EVERYTHING. I hate when
anything auto runs....

I dont know what CDROM has to do with this thread. It's a portable hard
drive, not a CDrom. And if tthere is some sort of "fake CD", then that
must be a fault inside of Windows, and there must be some sort of bug
fix for it.

THere are no (visible) files anywhere on these drives. As soon as I got
them, I deleted all the crap files on them. (I did zip up these files on
one of them, and copy that zipfile to a flash drive, just in case I
needed them).

If there is some hidden crap on these drives, I can and will just
reformat them. In fact I may do that right now on one of them, because
it's still blank. (The other one has some data on it).

These are Western Digital drives, and WD makes quality stuff.

On 2017-04-26 15:04, wrote:

This is an older XP laptop with SP3. I bought two Western Digital
external USB 1 TB hard drives, called "My Passport". Every time I plug
them in, they start "Installing New Hardware", and want me to go online
for drivers, and so on. (This computer is NOT connected to the internet,
except when I am at a WIFI).

This just might be the WD SES Driver that wants to install. I think it's
related to the ability to password-lock the disk and other miscellaneous
functions of the WD firmware. I did find mention of the "Virtual CD" on
WD's website, as Paul explained, but I've never seen it on my system and
I have half a dozen WD My Passports.

I have used these drives repeatedly, and each time I have to go thru
this process, then click cancel, and after that, the drive works fine.
You'd think that since the drive works fine, this annoyance would stop.
How do I stop it?

My experience with the SES driver is that it sometimes installs ok, and
sometimes it fails to install, I don't know why. Even if Windows goes
through the process of downloading it (1/2 the time it wont find it,
half the time it will) and "installing" it, it fails. You might want to
install it manually, then connect the drive and let Windoze do the
internet search (it will finally decide to use the already installed
driver anyway).

Best Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo Error reading FAT Record. Try the skinny one (y/n)?