Windows XP shuts down when I connect a Western Digial Passport Essential external drive to any of the USB port on my Dell Latitude computer. A blue screen appears with an error message "bad_pool_header. How can I resolve this problem1 person needs an answerI do too

That stop code suggests that you are experiencing memory corruption. This can be caused by buggy drivers or faulty hardware such as RAM. General guidance: Consider running chkdsk on all partitions. Let chkdsk complete on each partition and see if that helps. It can be helpful to use Driver Verifier. To enable Driver Verifier... start->verifier.exe->OK->Create standard settings->Next->select driver names from a list->Next->sort by Provider->select all non-Microsoft drivers->Finish, and OK your way out of the dialog. Then, reboot and use the system as you normally would, and wait for a problem. In the event that the system does not boot completely after enabling driver verifier, boot into Safe Mode and run driver verifier, and tell it to delete the changes. Wait for a bugcheck to occur after enabling verifier as described, and then upload it to your SkyDrive, and provide a link. Also consider running SFC /SCANNOW. If you boot into safe mode, do you still experience bugchecks? What about if you do a clean boot, or device clean boot? Consider testing memory with Windows Memory Diagnostic or memtest86. Note that memory that passes tests is not necessarily good memory - it just hasn't failed a test. Consider systematically eliminating RAM from the system - run with a couple of modules for a while, and see how things go. Then try the other modules. Other common suggestions include ensuring drivers are up to date (including video drivers), as well as ensuring that you're using the latest BIOS.