WD External Drive with Smartware / unlock.exe

[Smellbow]

Hello all, I'm new here & its my first post! As such ill apologies now if i make any massive gaffs in etiquette. I'm pretty new in this job role also hence why today I thought Id turn to Edugeeks collective minds for some guidance.

 

We have a new deputy head in school who wants to use her external hard drive, its a WD 1TB connected via USB. No problem with us there but when she attempts to use the drive it is protected by this Smartware software from WD. In 'My computer' you can see a UDF partition which contains unlock.exe. Presumably running this will show the actual data partition and allow transfers to continue. The issue is that trying to run unlock.exe presents an error stating it cannot run and must close...

 

I've yet to go back and try an admin account (office busy) to see if its just permission issue but even if it is we don't want to be dishing out admin rights to staff just to access external drives. Has anyone had any experience with this software? Is it possible to somehow allow her to run that one file elevated? I was thinking maybe there will be a way to disable the smartware and just use it like a regular drive...thinking aloud...in text...

 

I appreciate this post is a little preemptive as its not a complete problem yet but i thought id jump the gun in case anyone had any insights/tips/prior experience to help speed me along

 

Many thanks for reading.

[ICTonto]

Sounds like you have an encrypted hard drive, I would try a different computer, some of these programs run on flash or java, might be worth updating these, I would personally keep the encryption but if you can't resolve format the hard drive to remove the encrpytion.

[Smellbow]

Yes it seems so, She needs the data on the drive so im going to have another play with it and find her an alternative method if it does turn out to be an admin thing. Thanks for the response.

[Steve21]

We have a few schools using encrypted drives, you can just add the exe that needs to run to the allowed list of executables (based on your software restriction/applocker etc) settings.

 

Then there's no need to give out admin rights.

 

Steve

[MordyT]

I have this exact same drive (same program and all) and it runs on 7 and 8 without admin rights.

[Smellbow]

Ah, thanks Mordy, Im going to take another look then and see if I cant suss it out

[Smellbow]

Just a closing follow up, it would only open on an admin account oddly enough. Just copied the data onto a new school external drive without password software on it. Just a drag and drop affair and everyone is happy. We don't enforce password protection/encryption on drives and she was happy to switch as the drive came from a previous school.

 

Thank you to all who read, hopefully ill get to pick your brains on more complex matters in the future