New external USB drive causing BSOD

Gwaihir · 13 Feb 2023

Hi, I'm not sure if this should be posted under Hardware so if it's in the wrong section please feel free to move it.

I've recently bought a 4Tb Western Digital Elements external drive and have encountered a problem. What happens is this : when I plug it in to one of the USB3 ports on the back of my desktop PC I get the normal 2-tone connection sound. However when I select the 'Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media' icon on the taskbar, click on 'Eject Elements 2667', receive the message 'Safe to disconnect' and unplug the drive I don't get the corresponding disconnection sound and when I subsequently try to shut the PC down I get a blue screen that shows a crash dump, then the PC reboots instead of shutting down. After the reboot I can shut down normally but the next time I boot up I get a pop-up that Windows suffered an unexpeced shutdown. If I choose to let Windows search online for a fix after a few seconds the pop-up closes with no report of success or failure.

If, instead of disconnecting the drive, I simply shut the PC down this completes without issues and nothing is reported next time I boot up so for now this is an acceptable workaround.

When I first connected the drive Windows reported that one of the driver elements had not installed successfully although the drive appeared to work perfectly well. When the connection problem appeared I naturally thought this installation failure was the cause so I went into Device Manager and used Update Driver to allow Windows to search online after which the offending element was reported as having installed correctly. Update Driver now reports it as up-to-date.

I have an older 1TB WD Elements that I've been using for a number of years which connects and disconnects properly without issues, the only difference being I plug that into one of the USB2 ports on the front of the PC.

I'd be interested to receive any thoughts on the problem.

torchwood · 13 Feb 2023

please not W7 does NOT support drives that large...... have you split it into a number of partitions, and be using UEFI,
check this thread
6TB HDD, but BIOS won't allow over 2TB

ian50 · 13 Feb 2023

I have to disagree with Torchwood here, I'm afraid.

I'm running a Win 7 Pro Hp250 laptop (as one of three machines in a small home network). This has a WD Elements 4Tb external USB3 disk running off it successfully for well over 12 months now. The WD is formatted as a basic GPT with 3726Gb available in a single partition.

The PC is an i5-8265U with 16Gb RAM. BIOS (not UEFI) with the C: drive formatted as MBR and NTFS.

So, amongst things for Gwaihir to try, perhaps first is a simple "chkdsk /f X:", where X: is the WD drive letter. I have found that the WD Elements is somewhat sensitive to being pulled on and off. Fairly regular "chkdsk /f" maintenance is useful.

Also - and this should be done anyway - he should go into Control Panel > Disk Drives > other-click WD Elements > Properties > Policies tab and *ensure* that the external WD is not configured with Write Caching on (that is, configure as Quick Removal). Using Write Cache may increase operational speed of the drive but it risks corruption when the external drive is removed, despite using the "Safely Remove ..." option. At the least, the external drive's controller ROM chip can quickly become knotted up.

Gwaihir · 13 Feb 2023

Thank you both for your replies. I haven't split it into smaller partitions and hadn't considered that the disk capacity might cause a problem but like with ian50 it appears in Windows Explorer as a basic GPT with a capacity of 3.63Tb. This leads me to believe this single partition should be ok and I'd prefer not to split unless really necessary. The Policies tab shows it is already configured as Quick Removal and chkdsk reports no problems detected.

Since there is clearly a difference of opinion on the maximum capacity supported by Windows 7 it would be useful to get some more opinions and see what the general consensus is on this subject.

ian50 · 13 Feb 2023

It's not really just an opinion on whether a Win7 non-EUFI machine can use an external 4TB USB3 disk as a single partition. It can and does. Whether one might want to is a different question - and not one I'm addressing here. A 4TB disk cannot be used as a C: drive on a non-EUFI machine, but it functions externally perfectly well. I run external WD Elements's as 2, 3 and 4TB - all of them function properly but need the "chkdsk /f" maintenance, perhaps weekly.

So you've done the software moves - "chkdsk /f" and no Write Cache - without result. That seems to leave a hardware issue.

Go into Device Manager and uninstall the external WD disk (just be sure that it's correctly identified first) - then use the Action tab to re-install it. A lot of times re-installing hardware resolves issues. If no joy, can you try the WD disk on another machine (a friend, whoever).

- - - Updated - - -

Just realised I hadn't included another common reason for high capacity external WD Elements USB3 disks to fall over.

They are also sensitive to fluctuations in power supply, even minor fluctuations. I don't run more than two (2) at a time off a USB3 hub. I've found that running three almost guarantees that one at least falls over, with random access reliability. One way to test this is to try different USB ports, adding successive loads to watch what happens.

Gwaihir · 14 Feb 2023

Ok, I'll do a bit more experimenting. I have a second desktop PC with similar specs running the same version of Windows which my wife uses so I'll try the drive on that when I get an opportunity.

Re: the number of USB ports in use I have mouse, keyboard, scanner and printer on USB2 and only the 4Tb drive on USB3. The scanner and printer are turned off. I did use both drives concurrently yesterday with the 4Tb on USB3 and the 1Tb on USB2. I used the "Safely Remove..." for the 1Tb which worked normally (I haven't checked yet but I suspect this is also probably configured for Quick Removal). I left the 4TB connected until I shut the machine down and that completed normally but interestingly this morning when I went to disconnect the 1Tb drive with "Safely Remove..." the pop-up also listed the 4Tb drive even though it wasn't connected.

MisterEd · 14 Feb 2023

I have a similar age Gigabyte motherboard but mine is for AMD. Back then these Gigabyte motherboards had a proprietary EFI BIOS instead of UEFI. With EFI there was some support for drives larger than 2.2GB. It says this in the motherboard manual:

EFI CD/DVD Boot Option
Set this item to EFI if you want to install the operating system to a hard drive larger than 2.2 TB. Make sure the operating system to be installed supports booting from a GPT partition, such as Windows 7 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit. Auto lets the BIOS automatically configure this setting depending on the hard drive you install. (Default: Auto)

Gwaihir · 17 Feb 2023

Hi MisterEd, thanks for your reply. The manual for my Gigabyte GA-P61-USB3-B3 motherboard doesn't give many details on the BIOS other than it's an Award Modular BIOS V6.00PG.

I haven't got any further with trying fixes on my own PC but I have tried the drive in the other PC which has a Gigabyte GA-Z77-DS3H with Intel Core i5 3550 3.3GHz cpu. The driver installation reported a partial failure identical to mine, as shown in the attached screenshot, but despite this the drive works and, significantly, disconnects properly with notification sound and does not cause a BSOD when shutting down. I did try letting Windows search online for a driver but it just reported that the existing one was up-to-date, even though one element has clearly not been installed.

I then decided to uninstall the drive but the next time I plugged it in it immediately appeared in the device manager window, which I'd left open, without reporting re-installation of the driver so I'm not sure what happened there.

The architectures of the machines differ markedly in terms of the internal disk drives and interface adaptors installed so I'm not sure this result tells us much.

ian50 · 18 Feb 2023

It is the driver causing the erratic behaviour.

My Device Manager reports for WD SES Device:

Western Digital Technologies as Driver Provider

Driver Date 6/07/2020

Version 4.55.25.661

WD does offer drivers for the Elements drives. You can search their site and try one driver after the other till one works.

The SES driver on my system does not actually show in Device Manager until the drive is plugged in. It's quite annoying in a way that WD decided to go somewhat lone star on this drive type while other drives it supplies use the standard MS drivers. Anyway, you should be able to resolve your issue from the WD websites.

Gwaihir · 18 Feb 2023

My Device Manager shows the driver provider as Microsoft. I've looked on WD Support but can't find any drivers for download. When I go to 'Download Software, Firmware and Drivers for WD Products', then select 'WD Elements SE' from the list (the only item listed as "Elements") it takes me to a page where the only downloads are for software called 'WD Discovery' and 'WD Drive Utilities'. If you know of another part of WD's site where I might find some drivers I'd be most grateful.

As you can see, if I try to update the driver from within Device Manager it simply says the best driver is already installed and is up to date. I'm ready to try one or more WD drivers if I can find them.