Laptop hanging

[steve_nfi]

I have a laptop which when I plug a usb device (hard drive or pen drive) into it and try to do a bulk move/copy it hangs.

I can move things in small batches but any thing largish makes the whole thing hang and you have to power off rather that reboot to get it started again.

I have rebuilt the laptop but that doesn't make a difference.

As soon as you do a large move/copy the power to the external hard drive goes and the whole laptop just stops.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

[Michael]

I presume you've tried different USB ports on the laptop? You could try a PCMCIA card with USB ports and see if this makes any difference, or alternatively, link it upto a network via ethernet and copy the data this way.

 

In a worse case scenario if none of these methods work, extract the hard drive and install it as a slave drive in another system.