[RobinH]

I recently bought a Western Digital 250Gig external hard drive which came in Fat32 format. I reformatted to NTFS via XP but some programs did not work well. I was told, by a geek, to put it back to Fat32 and try it like that. I downloaded the WD FAT32 Reformatter tool from Western Digital but when I ran it the program hung and I had to restart my pc. When I did that I got the BSoD straight away. Disconnecting the drive my pc works fine but as soon as I connect up the external drive I get the stop error 0x50....page fault in nonpaged area....Symsnap.sys F8455482 base at F8445000
WD won't help cause they say stop errors are a microsoft problem not the hard drive. Is my drive fried or is there some way of running and formatting it? Any suggestion would be most welcome.

Edited by RobinH, 27 February 2006 - 06:59 AM.

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Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. I suggest removing the hd from the external enclosure and putting it into your computer as a slave EIDE hd, and format it that way. Hopefully this is not one of those "off the shelf" units that makes it impossible for the user to open the enclosure. I have 4 external hard drives and I have found it works best to put the hd in my computer, format it and then install into the external enclosure. All of mine are ntfs and I use them on 3 different systems, both WXP-Pro and W2K-Pro without any problem.

[austin_o]

Hi and welcome to Geeks to Go. I suggest removing the hd from the external enclosure and putting it into your computer as a slave EIDE hd, and format it that way. Hopefully this is not one of those "off the shelf" units that makes it impossible for the user to open the enclosure. I have 4 external hard drives and I have found it works best to put the hd in my computer, format it and then install into the external enclosure. All of mine are ntfs and I use them on 3 different systems, both WXP-Pro and W2K-Pro without any problem.

[RobinH]

Thanx for the quick response but you guessed it, off the shelf with a nice plastic cover, you know, the one which is once removed...never to be put back.

[austin_o]

Well, it should be under warranty. I would persue this with the manufacturer as a warranty claim. Don't let them off the hook and allow them to blame M$. You said your computer works fine if that device isn't plugged in.

[RobinH]

Ok thanx i'll get hold of them