External hard drive crashes explorer

I know, its a drive from 2004 but it still works, in linux, but whenever i plug it in it crashes windows explorer, it goes to not responding, have tried everything, reformatted in linux, tried no partitions in linux and it all works fine in linux but windows doesnt like it, but then it said that if failed and as soon as i unplug the drive (its an internal hdd on a dock) then windows explorer springs back into life, i cant do a low level format because wds tools are windows only and windows crashes , should i zero it out, or is this drive toast

 

Probably because Windows doesn't understand Ext2/3/4 file system. Windows will only do FAT, exFAT, FAT32 and NTFS.

 

I formatted to fat 32 sorry forgot to mention

 

Sounds like a formatting error to me. Your partition may be too large. Look up and see what the largest FAT 32 partition was. Wasn't it like 120gb or something??? I can't remember what it was. I think there may be JFS2 or JFS3 drivers for windows, or NTFS drivers for linux, though you may only be able to READ from the NTFS in linux unless it's advanced further if you want to try something else. Do some googling. Try turning off autoplay in windows, too (that scans new drives automatically and looks for autorun.inf).
EDIT: You can also open the computer management applet in windows, from control panel, administrative tools, it's there. Choose storage, then go and click on the disc management. Do this after disabling autoplay, and then plug in the drive once you get in here and see if it still locks up, and if it DOES, see that that applet isn't locked up.