Hello all, first off this is a wonderful forum. If anyone knows how to help me this is the place. I have and newer Hp laptop running windows xp. I can list all the stats but I dont think they are the problem. Everything was working fine until I decided to get an external hard drive that plugs into the firewire IEEE 4-pin port. At first the computer recognized the extra drives and life was good. Then I started getting occasional blue stop screen when I plugged, unplugged the hard drive. Then i started getting the blue screen after i tried to go to my desktop after the xp welcome screen. I spent 2 hrs on the phone with hp (-fun) they had me go into safe mode and into msconfig and disable my startup properties. I then had to repair the xp system from the cd. Then everything seemed to work and it asked me if I wanted to change the startup properties back to the normal, which i did. Bam, another blue screen. So i figure something on the startup/task bar is causing the stop message. How do I change or fix this so that I can use the external hard drive? Or do I just need to take the thing back?

It is an IO gear 120Gb hard drive, I have emailed them with this question and no respose.

Here is the Stop error

Stop 0x0000008e (0xc0000005, 0xF7AC78B2, 0XEC01BC10, 0X0000000
Stop sysdrv.sys - address F7AC78B2 base at F7AC7000, datestamp 4021c60f

everytime this happens the only way I can get past the welcome screen is to repair the Xp OS which takes 30 min each time. right now everythings works but only because most items in the task bar are disabled, and I am gunshy about pluggin in the external hard drive.
I am hoping someone has an idea of what to do. Thank you sooo much for any help.