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I have a Early 2008 24" iMac. On my USB ports, I have my wired keyboard, my external Seagate HD (for Time Machine), and I have a joystick. For quite some time, it seems like all of my USB devices keep disconnecting, and then reconnecting. This is particularly bad when it comes to my backups.

What can I do to stop this behavior from happening, and what more do I need to provide to help with this very annoying.

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2 Answers

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Are there any USB hubs connected or the devices connected directly to the mac? If there is a hub, consider disconnecting it and seeing if it helps. If not, does the problem go away if you remove one of the devices? I have seen some weird issues with a device intermittently shorting out.

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The problem seems to be with the Seagate drive. It was suggested that in Energy Saver, I disable the checkbox that says "Put the Hard Disk(s) to sleep when possible". So far, this seems to be working, but I am going to monitor it for a bit longer. – Mike Eggleston Jan 11 '12 at 19:08
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You don't happen to be running Parallels or some other virtual machine host do you? Those apps often have a habit of stealing your USB devices for use in whichever virtual machine is running.

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No, this is just straight-up Mac only. No virtualization is running. – Mike Eggleston Jan 11 '12 at 18:46

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