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Solve : PC can not boot with external drive connected? |
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Answer» Just installed a new external HARD drive (usb), the drive works fine. When I restart, the pc freezes and will not load windows until I unplug the usb drive and force a restart. With the external drive hooked up, if I shut windows down instead of restart, and wait 15 seconds and then start the pc, it boots up and works fine. Any ideas?Try getting into the BIOS and make sure your Primary (Master) Hard Drive is set to boot first. I haven't changed the boot order, but I have checked the boot order and it is cd rom then my primary drive. I think you are wrong. If the boot order is "cd rom then my primary drive" it is unlikely to be trying to boot from the external drive, unless by mistake it thinks your external drive is a CD ROM or your Primary drive. Why did you say "I agree it is trying to boot to the usb hard drive" ? Have you seen evidence to this effect in the system Event log ? I suspect you may have been DECEIVED by access activity of the External Drive. This does NOT mean it is being booted from. My system start up takes 20 seconds longer now that I have an External drive. This is because XP Home edition seems to inspect all the directory structures on all partitions before it gives me control. It used to take even longer until I archived as a solitary disc image one complete partition with 40,000 files, and then deleted the original 40,000 files. I believe the start up inspection means that when I aim Windows Explorer at any part of the External drive, the Access Activity LED remains OFF because Windows has already cached all the directory information and does not need to take another look. Another reason is that Windows may want to run any AUTO run files on external / removable devices, and if it cannot find them it looks for various things such as video files or music files etc. etc., and then, again before it yields control, it will offer to run whatever applications it thinks appropriate to the files it found. If it has found something which merits this treatment, perhaps there is some Windows error which prevents success, and this could lockup the system permanently. If you still have difficulty, I suggest you use Event Viewer to inspect the logs, especially the System Log, to observe the difference between a successful start up and a failure. N.B. I do not know if this is dangerous, but I have just launched TWO instances of Event Viewer, and this allows me to view start up sequences simultaneously and side by side, rather than looking at one sequence and trying to remember what I saw two pages earlier. I have now closed the Event Viewers and nothing has been broken. Regards Alan |
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