Hello,

I'm powering my mbed project from a 6V lead acid battery connected to VIN. If I connect the USB cable to my PC while the battery is connected, quite often my Windows Vista PC crashes with a "blue screen of death".  The PC resets, and won't boot until the mbed USB is detached (I'm not sure if turning off the battery power would also let it boot - it's not something I want to experiment with too often).

Now I'm making sure to turn off the battery before attaching the mbed to the PC via USB, and haven't seen the crash happen in the half dozen or so tries since.

Is this to be expected?

Thanks,
Rob.

Hi Rob,

The PC not booting with the mbed attached is quite normal if your PC BIOS is setup to try and boot from USB drives. It is probably trying to boot from mbed :) It'd be just the same if you had any other USB drive attached when you boot the PC. See:

• http://mbed.org/handbook/PC-does-not-boot-FAQ

The problem with the crash is a little more surprising, and not expected. If you can investigate more and/or drop us a line at support@mbed.org with details of how to reproduce it, we'd very much like to investigate as it is not something we've seen.

Simon

I logged in as an Administrator and Windows Problem Reporting (or whatever it's called) told me that Acronis backup had caused a problem and gave me a link to an update.  Unfortunately it's an update for a later version of Acronis which doesn't apply to the version I have.

So perhaps the fault lies with Acronis, and the trigger is the embed.  I've no idea why or how to diagnose further.

Rob.

s/embed/mbed/

duh.