hello again, right then, new usbs arrived and i can flash first time every time now. Good start. So box is flashed with latest image 44 and nothing else but whenever I connect a powered hard drive - either via the internal connectors or via usb front or back the machine immediately reboots itself and goes into a loop. There are no crash logs. it will then only boot when I disconnect the drive. I have tried with a 250gb ssd both in a caddy via usb and direct internally and same thing with a 500gb 2.5 inch spinning disk. I can here a clicking sound from the powered drive. Exact same result. To me this seems like a problem with the power provided to the drive. A usb stick inserted front or back mounts as /media/hdd no problem.
Any further ideas please ?