Hi,
Firstly, I created an account just to post my solution, anyone who bought a WD external needs all the help they can get IMO. (from my own bad experiences and countless hours of trouble shooting)
To the admins: Fix the frikin forum account registration. I hate having half my entries wiped everytime I miss read the dodgy validation or choose a in use user name. I almost gave up it was that annoying.
I already had two older WD 1.3TB smartware externals that worked fine (after much prior fiddling so my PC could boot with them connected). So I eliminated USB problems etc immediatly. But apon connecting a new 3TB Essential the PC BSODed during driver installation.
LOOOONG story short there was some sort of conflict with COMODO disk encription. (cderaw.sys in the crash dump).
I uninstalled it to fix the issue. If you really need it I guess your journey of pain continues.
My advice for anyone having a similar problem is to check the crash dump and find out what software could be causing it. This one threw me off because there had been no problems untill now, even the previous WD externals installed fine first time.
After the BSOD the drives will appear to be working (connected to USB) but with NO drive letter. Scanning for hardware changes or attempting to assign a drive letter resulted in a BSOD.
If you have no drive letter for the HD you should uninstall the mass storage device driver (and maybe uninstall the external under hard disks also) in device manager reconnect the HD and it will attempt to reinstall. If the conflict is gone it should work as normal and get a drive letter.
