Spoke to Seagate tech support today re. External hard drive. He denied that the light going out and the drive stopping to spin when unplugging it from USB on computer means it is getting it power from the computer's power supply and checked with some others at tech support who agreed. Then it occurred to me to disconnect the External hard drive power supply to see what happens WHILE it is still connected to the computer via the USB. Voila, this also makes the light go out and the drive stop. Tech guy's speculation (amd mine, actually) is that plugging it into USB sends start up signal, which makes sense to me, since there is no reason for drive to be running if not connected to computer, or at least fully powered. So they think the external drive is okay and nothing to do with the low system voltage message, even though I started getting this around the time I set up the hard drive.
Guess, if correct, this means one less problem, but still the computer power supply problem, right? If bad, will power supply go gradually or could it fail suddenly, preventing being able to turn computer on? Thanks Randall On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Tom Piwowar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >Now I'm really confused - why would the external HD's power supply not be > >supplying its power?? What, pray tell, does all this mean as far as the > low > >power messages? > > I think you have demonstrated that your drive's power supply is kaput. So > the drive has to pull all its power over the USB. > > The drive needs more power at start up to get the drive up to speed. That > is why you only get the low power message when the drive is spinning up > and you have other devices also pulling power over USB. > > > ************************************************************************* > ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** > ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** > ************************************************************************* > ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
