BSOD causes USB drive to be "not initialized"?

I have an older Dell with what I know is a flakey sound card - soundblaster. I've had occasional BSOD's over the years in spite of upgrading the driver (P16x.sys using the Dell OEM version) but I've lived with them because they've been rare.

The other day I had another one and suddenly my backup disk became "not initialized" when I looked at its status. So I panicked and ran over to Fry's to buy another backup USB drive to do immediate backups just in case. I've been burned by lack of backups and turn immediately paranoid in these situations.

But now I'm wondering how typical it is for a sound card BSOD to cause the disk to lose it's status? Would an MBR backup/restore program be in order? If so, could someone recommend one? Also, if this kind of problem could easily occur again especially if my main drive could get "eaten ", should I run back to Fry's and buy a new sound card? Or could something else being going on, even coincidentally?

I have a version of the dump tools from here, but my symbols were not updated since the SP3 upgrade so the results have some ugly messages. Excerpts follow:

...

** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for P16X.sys
*************************************************************************
*** ***
*** ***
*** Your debugger is not using the correct symbols ***
...
Probably caused by : P16X.sys ( P16X+2375d )
...
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP (7f)
...
BUGCHECK_STR: 0x7f_8

TSS: 00000028 -- (.tss 0x28)
.tss 0x28
eax=f71eab44 ebx=000000eb ecx=0060e351 edx=00000013 esi=f71eab44 edi=00000003
eip=f719c75d esp=b19d4000 ebp=b19d4010 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz na po nc
cs=0008 ss=0010 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=0030 gs=0000 efl=00010202
P16X+0x2375d:
f719c75d e82bf4ffff call P16X+0x22b8d (f719bb8d)
.trap
Resetting default scope

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: DRIVER_FAULT

PROCESS_NAME: svchost.exe
LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 00000000 to f719c75d

STACK_TEXT:
b19d4010 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 P16X+0x2375d


STACK_COMMAND: .tss 0x28 ; kb

FOLLOWUP_IP:
P16X+2375d
f719c75d e82bf4ffff call P16X+0x22b8d (f719bb8d)

SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0

SYMBOL_NAME: P16X+2375d

FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner

MODULE_NAME: P16X

IMAGE_NAME: P16X.sys
..​

 

I guess either I'm impatient or the people here could not answer my questions. On another site someone recommended TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk as the answer to my question asking for an MBR recovery program. Has anyone here used that software?

 

For the sake of closure, I did upgrade the sound card. TestDisk did not work for me so I wound up just reinitializing the external drive which seems to be working fine now. But I also did a DVD backup to be safe.