Asus G53SW + WD My Passport = Black Screen

I accidentally stumbled upon this weird connection of things. Without connecting the External HDD to my laptop, it was just laying ontop of my notebook, next to the palm rest. Suddenly, the screen went out. First I tried pressing buttons, etc. Ended up rebooting. Later I discovered, that if I remove the External HDD from the top of my notebook, the screen comes back again. You should look at the video I made. I can reproduce the event as many times I want, but only precisely placing it the same way. Please, even read the video description.

Any ideas would be appreciated, and if you could tell me if it's hurting my laptop or not. (if I have done any damage to it by this).

Weirdest thing happening to laptop - YouTube

 

Not sure of the G53 layout but perhaps it's tricking the display into thinking the lid is closed? Is there some sort of sensor there?

 

There are no sensors. Personally I think it may have something to do with some magnetic field effects. The lid closing sensors are in the back of he screen. And as mentioned, it can't be something physical, because the triggering depends on the placement of the HDD, and only the HDD causes this. So if I place my mouse on top of my laptop, nothing happens.

 

That is odd, I have tried to replicate the issue with my G53SW and WD Passport, but haven't been able to replicate the issue.

 

Have you tried in every position and with patience, because you have to get it right in oreder to work. It takes some "practice". But it could easily be, that your laptop doesn't have this glitch, because mine is a little different than yours. No SSD, i5 and no HD screen.

 

If some one has an answer in the future, please post it in the youtube comment section, because i will stop checking this thread due to lack of replies.

 

tough ont he not checking but. you have a hall effect sensor near the touchpad. this senses disturbances in an magnetic field. hard drives of the mechanical variety are ferroceramic disks with huge tightly packed clusters of low intensity magnetic bubbles across the surfaces, being spun by a pancake motor(all electric motor create strong magnetic fields), with a magnetically polarizing red write head floating on an air cusion over the platters, made out of metals which disrupt magnetic fields, being positioned by yet another motor, which sites between a pair of high strengths curved magnet plates on the motor side).

you sit this on top of a sensor designed to detect if theres a weak magnetic field next to it so it can tell the display lid is down.

you are surprised??

i seem to recall those sensors can go bad or twitchy as is, causing it to respond to the density of bone in your wrist, or contact proximity of the cover plate, or just not responding and dead and landing on the sending object detected state messages but not really seeing anything at all. rarer, but common enough across computers using it to be searchable.

as to reproducing it, different models and sizes of the wd passport will vary their components. furthermore if one of the motors in the drive is going it can put out far more "noise" than normal when powered.

bu end of the day, putting powerful magnets near the computer is generally a bad idea. (if you want to ruin a display put one near the lcd while its running. instant probable permanent damage if you use rare earth or neodymium type magnets- which are typically the strong variety such as whats contained in the armature inside mechanical hard drives.) do yourself a favor and keep the usb hdds to the sides an inch or two away from the machine or its cables(especially video or network cables- note usb is a type of network cable after a fashion) when operating them.

 

i can reproduce it... same thing happens when i put my external WD on top.. the fix is pretty simple... to solve this problem "don't put your external hdd on top of the sensor" lol