Macbook Pro Core Duo Crashing When Seagate 750 HD Attached

[jimbridger]

I have several new Seagate 750 gig external hard drives. They worked fine until recently. I now plug one or the other into my Macbook Pro and it crashes the system. The type of crash that a curtain falls down over the screen and a message comes up that says I have to push the power button down for several seconds to do a hard shut down. The only change that I made recently was the recent MAC OSX update. I plug the same drives into a Windows XP machine and they show up fine. Anyone else out there with similar problems? I looked into calling Seagate but of course they're closed on weekends.

 

[Ifrit]

I have noticed that OSX sometimes has problems with a combination of certain USB peripherals. (In my case G11 Keyboard, mouse, Palm PDA and eternal disk drive) To be 100% sure:

- use the disk drive directly on the USB port (without USB HUB etc.)
- try to disconnect other USB peripherals first
- try booting OSX while the drive is connected (shut down the MacBook connect the drive and then boot up the machine)

It might be that there is a problem with the file system on the HD. Backup your files on another system and then reformat/restructure the whole thing.

Otherwise, the logs might point to the reason of the frequent crashes. Usually OSX brings up the few last entries in an error message if you start it again after the Kernel panic.

 

[jimbridger]

Ifrit,

Thanks for your response. I had already tried all of your suggestions other than the reformat. I'm amazed how many people in these forums feel the answer is to "Just Reformat". Yea right!! Thankfully this drive is already backed up. My problems only began after the new OSX update that Apple released. This hard drive as well as the other four all are unreadable with the new OSX update. So much for quality control at Apple!!! Thank god they are not the only game in town.