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Evening all,

I'm having a right time with my Seagate 5TB USB Hard Drive. It was being used as a NAS via my TP-Link router, but I now want to use it attached to a PC. the TLDR is basically as soon as it's plugged in, Windows 10 BSOD's with the PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA error.

Everything I googled says to run various programs to check drive health, but it crashes the 3 different PC's I've tried it on, all within seconds of being plugged in. I'm out of ideas, so asking here in case anyone's had this issue before. I suspect the drive is toast, I mean - It is a Seagate...

Yeah, if you can't run anything to check it out, I'm not really sure what you can do with conventional software. I was going to suggest chkdisk and the like, but if you can't stop the PC from BSOD'ing then heck if i know.

Have you tried connecting it to a Linux/Mac/non W10 PC?

I've not tried the Linux idea, and have very little experience in dealing with it. Google search turns up some USB flash drive versions I can boot to without touching Windows, but does it come with disk check software like Windows does?

Another option is to try and boot the PC with the drive already plugged into the USB port.

ludi wrote:

Another option is to try and boot the PC with the drive already plugged into the USB port.

Thats how it was discovered there was an issue sadly. The first PC I used it in was stuck in a boot loop, and this drive was the culprit.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

I've not tried the Linux idea, and have very little experience in dealing with it. Google search turns up some USB flash drive versions I can boot to without touching Windows, but does it come with disk check software like Windows does?

Yup, Linux has tons of amazing tools you can use without actually installing stuff. I'd suggest the Ubuntu "live CD" mostly because Ubuntu is likely going to be the easiest to navigate and find documentation for. I'm not certain that your Windows host machine won't crash when you connect the HDD to it though, but it's worth a shot at least!

https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/t ... -windows#0 - How to make Ubuntu Live USB

You may need to do a little searching for commands and such you'll need to use to get everything going though. Just be patient, it's not that bad I promise. Check out smartctl and badblocks for a couple useful command line tools that will give you tons of info about your drive. A GUI tool you might check out is gnome-disks if you don't love the command line or aren't experienced enough to use it.

I'm sure others here will have suggestions too.

Many popular Linux distros (e.g. Ubuntu) can be booted as a "live" distro which runs directly from the installation media and doesn't touch your hard drive unless you ask it to. Diagnostics which aren't included in the base image can be installed over the internet from the distro's repository even into a "live" installation; any software installed while running in "live" mode gets transparently installed to a ramdisk and therefore is implicitly uninstalled the next time the system is rebooted.

There are also distros which are designed from the ground up to be used as a "live" distro, without installation to the system drive, e.g. Knoppix.

If you're completely unfamiliar with Linux, a better approach might be one of the bootable system diagnostic images, like Ultimate Boot CD (in spite of its name, you can also boot it from a thumbdrive, so a CD/DVD drive is not required).

While it is entirely possible that the drive is toast, it is also possible that the disk is just partitioned in a way which is badly confusing Windows. If this is the case, simply wiping the existing partition table (or doing a "write zeros" to the drive) so that it appears to be "factory fresh" may restore it to usefulness. You should be able to do this with the Ultimate Boot CD image.

just brew it! wrote:

While it is entirely possible that the drive is toast, it is also possible that the disk is just partitioned in a way which is badly confusing Windows. If this is the case, simply wiping the existing partition table (or doing a "write zeros" to the drive) so that it appears to be "factory fresh" may restore it to usefulness. You should be able to do this with the Ultimate Boot CD image.

Just to be entirely clear here, your datas will be gone if you do this. Just wanted to explicity point that out before OP goes and does that

DancinJack wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

While it is entirely possible that the drive is toast, it is also possible that the disk is just partitioned in a way which is badly confusing Windows. If this is the case, simply wiping the existing partition table (or doing a "write zeros" to the drive) so that it appears to be "factory fresh" may restore it to usefulness. You should be able to do this with the Ultimate Boot CD image.

Just to be entirely clear here, your datas will be gone if you do this. Just wanted to explicity point that out before OP goes and does that

Yeah, I figured that was implied by "factory fresh", but best to make it explicit!

I tried a Linux live CD, not just a linux system........keeps things simple

If you run out of options on the USB carrier - and you're at the last steps before junking it - shuck the drive and plug it into a normal SATA port. Those USB to SATA adapters can be extremely troublesome when they die.

Waco wrote:

If you run out of options on the USB carrier - and you're at the last steps before junking it - shuck the drive and plug it into a normal SATA port. Those USB to SATA adapters can be extremely troublesome when they die.

That would likely be my next step as well. Eliminate the USB translator board in the enclosure as a possible culprit. Just out of curiosity, did you try reconnecting it to the router to see what happens?

Waco wrote:

If you run out of options on the USB carrier - and you're at the last steps before junking it - shuck the drive and plug it into a normal SATA port. Those USB to SATA adapters can be extremely troublesome when they die.

As a side note, OP may find that the USB converter is integrated into the drive's controller board. Wouldn't be the first time.

Seagate has never done that as far as I know. WD definitely does though.

The Egg suggested plugging it back into the router, and it was fine. So, I tried the Linux idea as the disk still works.

I boot into Ubuntu off a flash drive - the hard drive was detected and readable. It still breaks Windows when I re-started, so I copied all the data to another drive in Linux, then nerfed all partitions and the GUID tables. Plugged it back into windows - it wanted reformatting and now it's working again.

Crystal Disk Info says the drive is perfectly healthy, so can only assume the router did something a bit weird to format the disk for NAS use?

Either way, huge thanks to everyone who contributed with the Linux help and where to look. I'm a total Novice with that OS, but got there in the end and it's got all my data back.

geekl33tgamer wrote:

Crystal Disk Info says the drive is perfectly healthy, so can only assume the router did something a bit weird to format the disk for NAS use?

Yeah, sounds like it. A lot of consumer electronics actually runs Linux internally these days; but I don't think a simple Linux partition would cause Windows to explode like that, so that points to something a little more esoteric. Maybe it formatted it as a Linux logical volume group. Or maybe it formatted the disk NTFS, but in a way that wasn't 100% compliant with the official Microsoft implementation.

I fart in Microsoft's general direction for reacting to an unrecognized partition configuration/format on a data drive by BSODing. That's just sloppy.

Waco wrote:

Seagate has never done that as far as I know. WD definitely does though.

Funny you should say so, it was in fact a Western Digital drive I was remembering.