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My external hard drive (Seagate 2 TB) keeps disconnecting momentarily and reconnecting. Since it causes nautilus to open each time it reconnects, leaving my computer on overnight has caused system crashes and I have to do a hard reset. I know I should shut off my computer overnight, but sometimes I forget, and I just can't imagine regular hard resets being good for my computer.

It's a new problem, and didn't used to happen, so I'm not sure why it started. It also occurs less when I'm active on my computer. If I'm writing a paper, it rarely occurs, but if I'm watching a movie, it happens relatively often.

I dual boot Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 7. Cinnamon is me DE, but I sometimes use i3wm.

In Windows 7, my USB 3.0 has stopped working, and I wonder if that's related.

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  • My 1st guess: hardware failure (the USB connector). I would start looking at dmesg and /var/log/ for notices.
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 4, 2015 at 12:41
  • One thing you might check is to sudo -s then run this script: while true ; do sleep 1 ; dd if=/dev/sdb iflag=direct count=1 of=/dev/null ; done. Assuming /dev/sdb is your external drive, this will force access to it once every second until you hit ctrl-c. Leave this going for a while and see if the constant activity stops the disconnects.
    – psusi
    Jun 4, 2015 at 12:45

1 Answer 1

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First what kind of usb port on your computer is connected. Does your usb external hard drive have an seperate power supply. Make sure the power supply is plugged in. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with usb 2.0 ports but usb 3.0 allows more power over the connection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB. Also I might try another port. Also usb 3.0 can have power management which the powertop package if you install can be useful to troubleshoot but remember you need to use this with sudo in a terminal to change hardware settings. Also maybe try in control center to not give the popup for the media to prompt every time you put a drive in if it causes your computer to crash but this is more of a workaround. Then you can probalby still acess the disk just by opening the file manager of your choice in the left side pane usually.

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