Windows 7: USB stick crash

Don't know if anyone else has this problem, but I get a Windows Explorer crash when I plug a USB memory stick in to any of the USB ports on my PC. It doesn't happen immediately and I have been able to open files, but then it all goes pear shaped and stops functioning. At which point W.E. gives up and wont recognise the existence of the stick. If I try and shut down, it refuses to let me. Having seen a similar problem reported with Vista, I reformatted one of my sticks to NTFS. This worked, so is the problem with the FAT file system and Win 7?



I am running Win 7x64 on AMD Athlon64 Dual Core 6400+ with 4Gb Ram

Hugh

I have had no problems with my FAT32 stick. Did you try reformatting with FAT after formatting with NTFS? If not, then there is a possibility that the stick just had a bad format, and reformatting it fixed it.

I fixed a bsod problem today with that. It was caused by the networking driver.

You can follow this:

http://www.sevenforums.com/crash-loc...d-problem.html

If you don't have any previous bsod, then uninstall antivirus to test. Disabling will not help. Update motherboard/chipset drivers.

Jonathan

I have not tried to reformat back to FAT 32, but will give this a go. I should have made it clearer that I tried two sticks, both FAT 32, both produced the same result. I only reformatted one, the other still FAT 32. Both work in my XP machine and both worked in Vista and still do on a colleague's Vista machine.

torrentg

I'll try making a copy of the minidump, and updating the motherboard/chipset drivers.

Thanks for the advice. I'll report back on both.

Hugh

If you have Acronis install, uninstall it. That too has caused a bsod USB issue.

Updating the Nvidia chipset seems to have sorted out the problem. Have reformatted the mem stick to FAT 32 with no consequences. Thanks for all your help. I'd never have guessed the problem, nor the solution.

Hugh

restart windows 7 to:

startup repair

(automatically fix problems that are preventing windows from starting)

that fixed all my USB flash sticks from crashing windows 7.

ff.

Good, glad it's figured out. Sometimes it just takes a reinstall to fix those little things.