My Book vs. MacBook interaction problem?

[Fiveos22]

I recently switched from a Powermac G5 to a MacBook and ran into the problem of space...namely going from 320 gigs immediately available to a very cramped 80 gigs. I searched around for a good external and found that Western Digital's My Book line had been getting wonderful reviews, so I found a good deal on their 320 gig model and moved my life onto that drive.

Chief Complaint:
I am concerned that my Western Digital firewire drive is causing my MacBook to die, possibly harming the logic board.

History of Present Illness:
About three weeks ago I started having a strange problem where my MacBook would randomly turn off. By randomly, I mean unpredicatbly, not during heavy use or any specific application or the like. It was as though it was going to sleep, however, it stopped all function (no pulsing light in the front) and could not be awakened. I would push the power button and it would sound like it was coming out of sleep (drive spinning, etc.) and then kill on me (power out) after about 2 seconds. The only solution was to hold down the power button until it restarted and gave me a horrible long beep (afterwhich it would boot up more or less normally). Then, one fateful day two weeks ago my MacBook died (upon "restarting" it would show me a vertical lines colortest at 1280x960 resolution.

I took it to the Apple store and got the diagnosis of a bad logic board and they took it in for repairs. That's all well and good it is afterall a first revision of a product...I wasn't too surprised. They returned my MacBook to me last tuesday with a brand new logic board (removed the old one).

But since getting my MacBook back a week ago I have experienced the "kill" three times now. Most recently, this morning, it happened when I plugged in my MyBook external firewire HD. I had never noticed this before, but I may not have been paying attention well enough. The drive otherwise functions very well.

Questions:
Could this be due to another faulty logic board in my laptop?
Could this be due to my external HD (possibly zapping my logic board when being plugged in)?
Has anyone else had this problem?
Should I wait until my computer is completely b0rked before I go back the Apple store?

EDIT: I've started looking through the System Log and have found the following stuffs, any significance?

Just after restart

Sep  4 09:57:04 localhost kernel[0]: hi mem tramps at 0xffe00000
Sep  4 09:57:04 localhost kernel[0]: Previous Shutdown Cause: -82

 

[hesdeadjim]

Strange

Do you have another firewire device? If it's something with the logic board it seems that the firewire port is the culprit. You could check it out with another device.

Have you contacted Western Digital? Maybe this is a known issue and they could help you out.

To be honest, I suspect that it might just me another faulty logic board and I can't imagine the HD doing any damage. Did you do the normal repair technique: reset PRAM, reset PMU, etc? That might help. Either way, I would pursue contacting Western Digital and getting another firewire device. If nothing comes of it, go to Apple.

Also, you could run the hardware test yourself. Just use the hardware test DVD thats included with the system restore.

 

[Fiveos22]

Did the hardware test previously (before new board and after new board) and they both looked the same, no problems.

I just took the time to register my HD today, so I think I'll try to get another from Western Digital, just to make sure. The major problem with that is I have nowhere to put my 90 gigs of stuff in the mean time.

Any other suggestions?