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USB Accessories disabled. Unplug the accessory...

I'm suddenly getting the dreaded "USB Accessories disabled. Unplug the accessory (or device) using too much power to re-enable USB devices." warning when I plugged in my external hard drive. I usually connect the drive via thunderbolt but it wasn't recognizing the drive. The drive also has a the flat USB3 connector option so I plugged that in and got this error message for the first time. I took the drive to a repair place, thinking it was a faulty power supply and they said there was an onboard problem with the drive. That sucked, drives go bad.

Later I plugged in separate UB3 external drive and got the same error. I tried yet another external drive, this time a powered drive, and got the same error. I've since tried all three drives with a variety of Macs and none of them work anymore.

The only thing that I can think of that happened prior to all this failure was that I plugged in a thumb drive into an old Powerbook Titanium to copy everything off of it. It was slow so it ran for hours then the process failed and corrupted the thumb drive. I plugged that thumb drive into my Macbook pro to reformat/initialize it. All weird stuff.

I've booted in Safe-mode and reset SMC and get the same error. I ran Apple Diagnostic and it shows no issues.

Could my Macbook be frying these drives or is there some other issue? What could have caused this? Any ideas?

MacBook Pro 15″

Posted on Feb 21, 2023 11:59 AM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,452 points

Posted on Feb 21, 2023 12:25 PM

If multiple drives are having this issue and it occurs when connecting the drive directly to the laptop, then maybe you should have your laptop examined by Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider. When testing, make sure to disconnect all other external devices in case one of them is causing a problem and to confirm a single connected drive has this problem.

Make sure to test a drive on another USB port especially on the other side of the laptop if available. Some drives may require their own dedicated power supply.

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USB Accessories disabled. Unplug the accessory...

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