Blank Screen when portable hard drive plugged in to USB

Deputy head's fairly new laptop has started playing up:

HP 625 running Windows 7, standalone (not on domain). When he plugs in his Verbatim portable hard drive (model 47628, 250Gb), more often than not the screen is going blank instantly on the laptop. This laptop doesn't have power LEDs for the internal hard drive so tricky to tell if there is any activity going on, but the normal power on light is still lit. Can't get the display back. Did look to see if it had somehow toggled to an external display, but can't find any function key that looks like it will toggle the display between laptop and external. Am new to Windows 7 so don't know if this function has been dispensed with.

Anyway, we have tried two of the three USB ports, with the same effect. I've tried a memory stick and that works fine. He tells me that the hard drive has been fine over the summer with this laptop. And we did get it to plug in fine on one occasion. I've tried the drive in this desktop twice and no issues at all. Dodgy USB cable???? I am having difficulty diagnosing this, as I don't like to keep trying the drive in the laptop and of course can't see anything once the screen goes blank. The only way to get the laptop display back seems to be to force power down, which I'm not amazingly happy about doing too many times.

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Originally Posted by Andie

Can't get the display back. Did look to see if it had somehow toggled to an external display, but can't find any function key that looks like it will toggle the display between laptop and external. Am new to Windows 7 so don't know if this function has been dispensed with.

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not too sure if this will help but the toggle for external display on w7 is windows key and P , you should then get a pop up of screens to select. hth

Thanks for the toggle. I will see if that adds anything to the diagnostics.

OK, the toggle doesn't do anything.

I thought the issue had gone away. I edited the autoplay default for mixed content so that it would default to displaying the files on the hard drive. I plugged the drive in and ejected it three times without there being any problem. But the user said to try plugging it in after opening a document from the internal drive (Office 2010), and hey presto the screen was blank as soon as I plugged the drive in. Tried Win+P a few times, but nothing came up on the display at all. Had to force power down again.

Can anyone suggest anything further to try?

I doubt it but double check there are no hidden files such as autoexec.cfg in the root of the drive. Spidey senses are tingling about possible autorun malware.
Do that obviously on a off network machine with autorun disabled ;)