Phone automatically ejects while uploading photos

Question

Greetings - I have reached the end of my limited Mac knowledge and need some help with a recent problem.
For a few months now, I have been successfully transferring photos taken with my Samsung Epic 4g phone (Android 2.1-update1) to my MacBook Pro using the USB cable. Since I'm an old Windows user, I've been doing it the old fashioned way, coping the files from the phone over to a new folder on the laptop and then importing to iPhoto from there. Probably not as seamless as importing directly but it has been working fine.
About 3 weeks ago, the MacBook started ejecting the phone connection midway through the file transfer each time I tried. I had been coping over roughly 50 photos at a time (about 75 MB, usually taking only about 20 seconds) so I didn't think it was a matter of the files being too large. I started transferring files over in batches of 5-8 (about 10MB) and was able to successfully do this for a few weeks. Then I was only able to get one photo at a time over before the eject would happen. Now I can barely even open up the DCIM>Camera folder in my phone before the computer auto-ejects.
The auto-eject happens regardless of where on my laptop I try to copy the files to. It also happens when I try to import directly into iPhoto or even Preview the files directly from the phone.
I have read that there appears to be a problem between Android phones and the latest version of iPhoto (I have 8.1.2), but the auto-eject even happens when I close iPhoto altogether and just try to copy the files.
Finally, I'm pretty sure the problem is with the laptop and not the phone because I was able to transfer over a 125MB video from my phone over to a friend's MacBook Pro with no problem. I'm in Australia at the moment and unfortunately can't check for phone updates, but again everything was working fine up until a few weeks ago and worked fine on another computer just a few days ago.
Many thanks for any ideas. I'm on a round-the-world trip and really want to liberate my photos!
Charlie

Answer 1

Ah, should have mentioned that. Yes, I was using my normal cable when I successfully transferred the files to my friend's computer.
On the USB port, I've only ever been able to mount my phone to the computer with one of the two ports. The other one never recognizes the phone. I should probably get that figured out too, but since the other port had been working fine it wasn't a high priority yet.