USB external hard drive casues Laptop to freeze

DiiFMaritime

It started today when I plug in my USB external hard drive my laptop freezes and nothing happens, the only thing I could do was a forced shutdown.

The laptop runs on XP and has recently had all its system restore points removed as I am planning to reinstall windows and back everything up in the external hard drive. It worked fine last week, any ideas?

closed

Is the drive a powered up 3.5 or a 2.5 portable?

backup everything upto dvd as well, in case there is a problem with the drive. Try another machine?

if you are going to factory restore it, you may as well do it, and see if it cures the problem

DiiFMaritime

It is a 2.5 portable, tried on another machine and had no problem with it. Tried to plug it into mine again and it froze again! Not sure what has caused this sudden weirdness on my laptop as I had not installed/ removed any programs since I last used it

PS I plugged in another USB flash drive to the sam USB port on my laptop and it works, utterly confused now

closed

difficult to diagnose, could be a power or driver problem

or possibly drive corrupt, try running chkdsk on it on the working machine

DiiFMaritime

what do you mean by a driver problem? But if I can plug in another USB flash drive into the same USB port then can it still be a driver problem?

I have managed to delete stuff from the external hard drive on another laptop so the drive should be working fine.

alanrowell

How old is the computer? It could be as simple as the USB port you are using can't produce enough power to run the external drive

centretap

Could be any number of things but worth noting that a flash usb drive isn't going to draw anything like the power from the usb socket that a 2.5 hard drive does.

WhiteChristmas

It could be that it's a USB1 port - it would read a flash but wouldn't supply power for the hard drive.

visidigi

It could be, but the OP implies that they have had it working previously and now it suddenly doesn't.

OP does this do it on all the ports on the laptop or just this one? Does your cable have one of two USB headers on it for power? When you plug it in and your laptop freezes do you hear a ticking sound if you put your ear on the external drive?

If you do the power draw on the drive is too high for the USB port - implying either a driver issue on the laptop or a potential failure of that particular port (as power levels to it have dropped - as others have indicated flash has a much lower power draw than an HDD).

DiiFMaritime

alanrowell wrote: »

How old is the computer? It could be as simple as the USB port you are using can't produce enough power to run the external drive

centretap wrote: »

Could be any number of things but worth noting that a flash usb drive isn't going to draw anything like the power from the usb socket that a 2.5 hard drive does.

WhiteChristmas wrote: »

It could be that it's a USB1 port - it would read a flash but wouldn't supply power for the hard drive.

Thanks for the replies guys, the laptop is 5 years old, but it does have USB 2.0 ports and the 2.5 portable has always worked on the laptop. Is there any way of boosting the power output of the USB port?

DiiFMaritime

visidigi wrote: »

It could be, but the OP implies that they have had it working previously and now it suddenly doesn't.

OP does this do it on all the ports on the laptop or just this one? Does your cable have one of two USB headers on it for power? When you plug it in and your laptop freezes do you hear a ticking sound if you put your ear on the external drive?

If you do the power draw on the drive is too high for the USB port - implying either a driver issue on the laptop or a potential failure of that particular port (as power levels to it have dropped - as others have indicated flash has a much lower power draw than an HDD).

The laptop freezes when I plug it in any USB port and I do hear the external hard drive power up and then ticking sound sort of dies down after a few minutes. The cable only has 1 USB header, so a potential fix is to uninstall all the USB drivers and reinstall them?