strange USB drive behavious on late 2008 MBP

[paulinbognor]

Odd annoying problem that I fear could me major

Whenever I plug in any usb flash drives into the MBP they randomly disconnect, 10% of the time they will stay connected but most of the time they will keep connecting and disconecting, I've tried 5 different drives from different manufacturers all wth the same result.

Oddly if I plug a portable harddrive via a usb cable into the port its fine (so seemingly not a power issue) all the drives are fine in my macbook, MacPro and imac its just the MBP.

I've tried both ports with no difference.
Anyone have any ideas?

 

[UltraNEO*]

Sounds to me like you could be suffering from a power management problem, did you try resetting the SMC?

 

[lordthistle]

During your testing, are you using a single USB port?

 

[paulinbognor]

its the inconsistency thats the odd thing. After posting the thread, I had the machine shut down for a few hours, fired it up to see if there were any replies, put one of the keys in and transferred a load of files (about 5GBs worth) and its worked flawlessly for the last hour

I'm now trying to work out what was different to earlier. Only things so far are:

The MBP was plugged in to the power last time
At various times I had a second HD plugged in (but its definetly done it with nothing else plugged in)

hmm...has a look at the power reset and bookmarked the page. Trying to wait for it to happen again to check console to see if it shows up anything.