My Passport Hard Drives Shut Down My Laptop

I have a 500GB and 1TB My Passport external hard drives, which I use to store downloaded movies and televisions series.  They have worked fine since new (less than 6 months), until this week.  Now, every time I connect them to my Sony Vaio laptop, and start moving the movies or television series episodes to either of them, midway through my laptop screen goes black and it’s completely switched off, without any warning, just instantly black screen and no lights or sign of life.  Any idea how I can fix this problem since the laptop is fine until I attach a WD hard drive and within minutes my laptop is off and I have to reboot, re-attach the hard drive again and it switches off within minutes again.    Thanks for any help you may offer.

Hi Mountainlion:

Have you tested with a different USB cord?

Look in the Windows Event Viewer anfd see if there are any errors shown there. whick OS are you using?

Joe

Stylz20, thank you for your reply.  Both hard drives have their own USB cords, however, the behaviour happens with both.  It’s a real puzzle.

Joe_S, thanks for your reply.  Sadly I’m not very tech savvy, where can I check the Windows Event Viewer? 

I’m using Vista and the problem only started happening in the past two weeks.  One hard drive is 10 months old and the other is just 4 months old. 

I don’t have Vista handy but try right clicking computer and select manage it should be there. If not go into control Panel and look in Administrative Tools. Would have started about the time of the Microsoft updates for jan?

Joe

Thank you Joe, I’m at work right now but when I’m home later, I’ll check it out and report back.