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Recently I bought a raspberry 3, I formatted my sd card, I installed NOOBS on it I got it to my raspberry it was working fine. I plugged a mouse, keyboard and a flash, still working pretty good. But then I plugged an external HDD with USB 3.0(which probably requires too much power). So in the begging, the first five minutes everything was working solid. But 5 minutes later... system crashed. The HDD never worked again on that raspberry (probably because of lack of power).

So, raspberry is working fine for 2 days(I haven't used that HDD in this period) but suddenly system crashes again... I never managed to boot the raspberry again. I am using a 2.5A charger but I tried with 3 other chargers(I don't know their amps), I tried using my brother's orignal raspberry SD card with NOOBS on it and .. nothing.

But his raspberry zero was working just fine with both either my or his SD card.

The ACT led never lights up, while the PWR always does.

Any idea what is wrong ?!

Harton
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1 Answers1

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I think you are correct that the problem is related to power. You did not tell us about the HDD you used. Since you did not mention it having its own separate power supply then I would guess a Passport or something similar.

The maximum power to all USB ports defaults to 600 mA. However, it is possible to edit /boot/config.txt and add or modify the line to say max_usb_current=1 which doubles the amount of power available at the USB ports (for a combined total of 1.2 Amps). Of course, you will want the 2.5 Amp power supply.

Hackaday gives a good explanation of how this works. It is a software change that causes a GPIO hardware change. Here are the hardware details of how power is distributed to USB ports. http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/more-power-for-raspberry-pi-usb-ports/

Good luck.

SDsolar
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