Died and Rose Again

I have had my T42 for about 9 months now and have had no trouble with it so far, until today when something weird happened.

I have its LCD display turned off, with my LCD Monitor plugged in, my mouse also plugged into the USB. I was doing nothing much but only looking at some bittorrents, until I decided to plug in my 2.5" 80 GB external harddrive (one that does not require an AC adapter as it gets power out of the USB) into the second USB slot.

I have been doing this kind of setup (monitor, mouse, external HD, etc.) for over 2-3 months now since my desktop died on me.

So continue on, about 5 seconds after I plugged in my external HD, the laptop just totally shutted down. It died right away.

I thought it was a goner until about 10 minutes after when it suddenly revives and turned on by itself. I am wondering if anyone has any idea why this happened?

I mean if it just died then that's fine. But it has revived and is doing very well (in fact I am typing up this post on it now). Any ideas?

 

Just needed a brief nap

 

Well last night I plugged the 2.5 External HD into the USB slot again and then plugged my iPod into the second USB slot and right away the laptop died again, and again woke up after about 10 minutes.

Since then, I have tried to stop all programs, remove the monitor (and use its LCD), and tried plugging the two things into the USB slots again, and this time it worked.

It worked many times before, I just don't understand why it started dying just now.

 

I'm having somewhat similar problems with my thinkpad t43 as well.

like you I plug in an external HD and a mouse regularly when I get back home.

I left my laptop on and my hd on for a 5 day trip. when I got back, thinkpad couldn't detect my hdd anymore. it couldn't detect a card reader as well, but can still detect a USB mouse.
I plugged the HDD on another desktop computer and it works fine.

Me thinks it has something to do with the faulty USB. This may have to do with my bad habits of not doing the "remove hardware safely" thing before I unplug the hard drive...

can anyone help us with? anyone had USB problems before?

 

Well I don't think my problem is exactly a USB problem, I still believe it's a problem of overloading the laptop.

I have since got a power supply for my external HD, and so far it hasn't died when I used the same setup that caused it to die. So far so good, touch wood.

 

Hi. I don't mean to be contrary, but I do think it's one of two things (at least):

1) USB ports are "overloaded." I ran into a similar problem (though no power issues) when I plugged my external (powered) LaCie hard drive directly into my T42's USB slot #1 and then had 4 other devices plugged into a USB hub, which was then plugged into the USB slot #2. I disconnected my USB mouse from the hub to plug something else in, and then swapped out that device for my mouse again. Nothing happened - the optical mouse wouldn't power on, even when I plugged it directly into the laptop.

Application time: I spoke with a knowledge tech at my school and he told me that USB ports "expect" or draw a certain amount of voltage. With powered USB devices it's "easier" for the computer to handle since it doesn't have to give the powered device voltage (less strain). So, perhaps in your situation it's an overload, or there's something consistently wrong with the power management of the usb card in the laptop.

2) I assume your laptop was plugged in at the time right? Have you checked your power managment settings? I can't imagine that IBM didn't think that you would have this kind of setup and arrange the power management accordingly.

Well, I hope that helped... Sorry if it didn't.