Connecting external hard drive crashes Macbook Pro

TheDivingJourno wrote:

My own external hard drive works on my mac. The problem is very much specific to my wife's drive

Replace the HDD. They can and do fail.

Seagate might have other options, but crashing on connection is... inauspicious.

TheDivingJourno wrote:

My own external hard drive works on my mac. The problem is very much specific to my wife's drive

Sounds like catastrophic failure of the drive. The resolve is use a drive that works.

TheDivingJourno wrote:

Hello Apple community, I have a problem that I'm hoping someone can solve.

My wife has a Seagate HDD external hard drive which she uses to backup files from her 2022 iPad Pro.

Today, she asked me to move some files from my 2015 MacBook Pro (Monterey 12.6.8) onto the drive for her.

Unfortunately, when I plugged the Seagate drive into the USB port on my MacBook Pro the computer crashed and rebooted.

I have tried the drive with different USB cables and have also connected it to another MacBook Pro (Catalina 10.15.7) and every time the computer crashed and rebooted.

I have tried booting up the mac in safe mode with the hard drive connected and faced the same problem.

To make matters worse, the external hard drive is now not discoverable when connected to my wife's iPad. It was working fine beforehand.

When initially connected to the computer, the power indicator light on the Seagate drive illuminates and it briefly spins into action before the computer reboots.

I am the end of my computer know-how (which to be honest is pretty limited), and have two questions:

1/ Does anyone have any ideas on how to resolve this issue?

2/ If it is not fixable, any ideas on how to recover the data on the drive?

Kind regards

Mark

Try a different drive and compare your results...