USB power supply acting weird

[demian]

Hey there

I noticed something strange with my usb ports: I've got four usb ports directly attached to the back panel of my mainboard (ASUS A7V333). I use three of them (optical mouse, printer, usb harddisk). The mouse obviously gets it's power via the usb port and this works fine. The usb disk is a regular 3.5" ide drive and it needs an extra power supply. Without the external power supply the disk will still be recognized as a mass storage device but it won't start spinning. But the green led goes on indicating it's activated. This is all how I expect it to work. Now the weirdness:

When I power down my computer with the usb disk still attached and it's external power supply switched on the computer shuts down normally, the disk is automatically unmounted and the system halts. Fans stop, monitor goes blank, everything seems off. Except the green read led of my cdwriter (ide device attached to secondary ide port) goes on and when I hit the power button of my computer it won't start up again unless I unplug the usb disk... ???

Is this something to worry about?

Thanks for any input,
demian

[pbharris]

hi demain,
i would not say it is anything to worry about, i had a USB port that i had mis-wired due to an error in the manual, anyway i had the +5 and GND swapped and it never hurt my PC or the devices i hooked up to it.

any chance you have tried moving one of the grounds?

[demian]

I didn't do any checks on the cableing. The connectors are soldered right on the mainboard and that's how I bought to board. So changing anything there probably would cause more damage than fix things.