external hard drive problems

[Grace]

My external hard drive shuts my whole system down everytime I plug it in?

I just replaced the case/power supply and it still does it.

Any ideas? I have a TON of pics on there and several orders worth of recent pics http://www.weddingfotoforum.com/forum/images/smilies/frown.gif

It is a Western Digital My Book 500G hard drive...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Jon]

Maybe the power supply on the drive's died . . .

[condyk]

You could possibly take it out the casing and plug it into a spare connector internally to see if it works. Obviously, shut all power off on both devices before doing this and then boot.

[nadtz]

If its actually shutting down your system its possible it has suffered a catastrophic failure. I'm not sure exactly what causes the shutdown issue, but every time I've seen a USB or Esata external do this it has been with a physically failed drive. I hope you have a backup.

[condyk]

I had a USB external drive that wouldn't allow booting but was Ok if you plugged in after boot, so all is not necessarily lost yet ;-)

[sandpiper]

It does sound like a hard drive failure, the external drives are much less reliable than internal ones. I use several of them and have had three die on me so far, although only one so badly as to shut down my whole system, they have tended to just try and spin up and then shut themselves down. I just chuck 'em in the bin and buy a new drive, they're cheap enough to be regarded as routine replaceables with an average life of 2-3 years.

You could try taking it out of the case and installing it as an internal drive, that may get it working, but otherwise it is just down to buying a new drive and restoring from backup.

Hope you get it sorted OK.