BSOD with external hard drive

[phot0nic]

Hey, for some reason, I'm having BSODs with my external hard drive after upgrading to SP1. The BSOD is pretty uninformative, and leaves no info behind in the event log.

My external drive is actually an internal 320GB WD drive inside of an external enclosure. I connect to it via USB. Every time I power it on, the computer crashes. If it's on while the computer is starting, it crashes while booting.

The BSOD leaves a STOP: 0x0000007E message and states that the error occurred in partmgr.sys. That's all the information I can get from it. I'm not sure where to find a dump file to analyze. I tried searching the machine for all *.dmp files and I've found nothing.

Some notes:

- This drive worked find before the SP1 upgrade

- I upgraded to SP1 through the registry hack / WU method

- I dual-boot Vista and XP, and the drive works fine on XP.

- I tried another external hard drive (a friend's WD Passport to be specific) and Vista worked fine with it.

- I tried replacing the new partmgr.sys with the old pre-SP1 partmgr.sys (I know, bad idea), and the computer crashes when booting even without the external drive being on.

- I tried totally uninstalling all USB drivers and letting Vista reinstall them. This did not fix the problem.

- I also tried running chkdsk on the drive through my XP installation and it found no errors in the file system.

- I have recently run a RAM test (don't know if this matters) and it found no errors

I'm currently running Vista Ultimate x86 SP1. I appreciate all help on this I can get.

[phot0nic]

Just an update:

I wasn't positive that SP1 was the cause of this issue because I have done other things (updated drivers, installed software, etc.) since the last time I tried my external hard drive. I suspected SP1 because it was the most substantial change I had made.

So, to experiment, I tried uninstalling SP1. Sure enough, without SP1 installed, my hard drive works fine. When I reinstall SP1, it goes back to crashing the system.

Now I can confirm that there is an incompatibility between my drive and SP1. Any ideas on how I can go about fixing this? Thanks in advance.

[phot0nic]

I'm going to bump this again just to add that I tried a clean install of Vista (SP1 slipstreamed), and my hard drive crashed the clean install.

I'm confused. It works fine on XP, Ubuntu, and Vista pre-SP1. But, for some reason, even a clean install of Vista with SP1 crashes with this.

I'll probably end up purchasing a new drive, but I'm really curious as to what the problem is. My enclosure is just a standard external hard drive enclosure, and the hard drive is a WD 320GB IDE hard drive. There's not really anything exotic going on here.

If I can find someone else with SP1 installed, I may try their computer to rule out a SP1/drive/motherboard conflict and limit it to a SP1/drive conflict. Other than that, what can I try from here?

[DogFather]

I've just finished a fresh install of Vista Premium Home with SP1, and am having the same problems.

I'm using a Western Digital 160 IDE in an external case.

Every time I start it,I get a BSOD.

I sure hope Micro$oft comes up with a fix for this. :(

[brand]

You could run the debugger and put in your dmp log file and see what's crashing the nt kernel...

OneTouch.exe, software included with a Maxtor external harddrive, was crashing a Win 2k3 server I was working on.

[DogFather]

I ran the debugger and came up with this error :

"An application error has occurred and an application error log is being generated.

Exception: access violation (0xC0000005)"

I checked the error through Google and got this,

A Common Cause Of The 0xC0000005 Error:

The error 0xC0000005 is generated by an illegal "memory access violation". This can be caused by anything from faulty RAM, an incorrect/corrupt device driver, poorly written/updated software and more commonly under Windows XP Service pack 2, malware/adware installations.

Bad Microsoft code maybe?

[phot0nic]

Since I was already tight on space with my external hard drive I just bought a new external drive (WD MyBook, really liking it BTW) and the problem went away. I'm pretty sure Microsoft updated the generic driver and it contains a bug. It'll probably be a while before they notice and fix it.

[KiwiNZ]

I am not getting BSOD , just my external drives will not respond , I can see them and the folders etc but they will not respond.

This is on 3 different drives.

This has started since Iinstalled SP1, prior SP1 , no issues.

[romanski]

Hi Hitchhiker427,

I got apparently the exact same problem. After installing Vista SP1 upon activating my external USB HD (Maxtor Diamond Max 10 - 200Gb) I immediately got a BSOD complaining about the partmgr.sys with a 0x0000007E error (which all are abacadabra to me anyway).

I tried to restart numerous times with different configurations and only one time got through to the hard disk (when I started into safe mode with the hard disk on and connected before windows was starting up) but I was not able to repeat it since. I did not yet try the disk on Windows XP yet but I will soon. To me it seems indeed the driver was not updated correctly for older Western Digital/Maxtor disks, making them useless with Vista SP1...

Romanski