[Tfug] Failed drive == power problem?

[Claude Rubinson]

So my notebook's hard disk crashed this past weekend.  I stuck it in
an external USB drive enclosure to see what I could rescue off of it.
Fortunately, I had just backed up so all that was at risk were a
handful of emails.  And I was able to retrieve those files.  So all's
good on that end.

After the drive had been mounted for a while, however, it began to
crash my notebook.  It would give me an "Over-current change on port
1" error and the notebook would lose power and various indicator
lights (on the notebook) would start flashing.  The problem seems to
be with the failing hard drive.  Once I replaced the failing drive in
the enclosure with a good one, the problem went away.

Basically, it seems like the failing drive caused the drive enclosure
to draw too much power or caused a short or something that would crash
the machine.  Is this something that anyone's seen before?  There's no
actual problem here as I was able to retrieve all of my data before
the drive completely died.  I'm just curious as to how a dying drive
might cause a power-related problem.

Claude