Have been seen to do that. Especially if we get the wrong USB cables or if the laptop is on battery power.
There's a lesson here.
SOMEONE has to has an easy explanation for this...
Went on vacation last week... packed my carry on bag with two laptops and two external hard drives - a WD MyBook and a Maxtor OneTouch. Flight was booked solid so airline asked me to check my carry on. They told me to remove my laptops and the HD's should be fine being left in the bag. Got to my destination and NEITHER external would spin up. They both did the same EXACT thing. They wouldn't spin up (no clicking... nothing) AND the lights on both enclosures would blink this steady blink, BOTH at the same exact rate - not slow nor fast... almost like a 'warning' blink or something. Anyway, I got home today, removed the hard drives from their enclosures, plugged them into my desktop as slave drives, started up the computer and they BOTH worked with no issues at all. So I reinstalled them into their enclosures and now they are both working again as if nothing ever happened. Can anyone explain to me what the hell happened? Phone calls to both WD and Maxtor(Seagate) got me nowhere... as I expected.

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