Rachel Mae
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 | | | | | So, I just moved out of my apartment and have finally gotten (mostly) everything set up in my new place. However, I encountered a somewhat worrisome problem when I tried to boot up my desktop: it freezes at the Windows XP logo if my external Seagate drive is disconnected. No "progress bar" animation or anything.
I'm not sure why this is happening, as I only use the external drive for storing ROMs and music and such (there are no critical system files or programs stored there). My Windows 2000 installation (dual-booted) seems to have the same problem. It's not a critical issue at the moment, since the computer DOES boot up just fine when the drive is connected, but I'm afraid I'll be completely screwed as soon as it kicks the bucket. 
Any ideas?
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Surlent
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Try a chkdsk /f in an administrator command line, which runs at the next restart. If you had problems with your internal hard disk before, I strongly recommend a backup before you run checkdisk, as there might be an (although tiny) chance something screws up, if there's damaged sectors on the disk. That startup isse sounds wierd, as inside the BIOS you can probably only set the order of boot devices. And I don't think there's something wrong as you boot from the internal HDD correctly.
You could try to temporarily disable USB inside the BIOS and see if Windows starts up fine without the drive attached. Could the computer has save some system data written onto the external drive, or wants to access some data which seems vital (but cannot red if said external drive is not connected)? I hardly think this should happen. You could also check the Event Log, maybe it spits out some error, look for critical errors, usually marked with a white X on red ground.
The last chance might be to backup important data, while trying a reinstall. If you experience problems anyway, it just ensures it no software but a hardware problem.
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BlackNemesis13
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 | USB devices can be weird. Is the External Harddrive the only USB device you have hooked up to your computer? If not, try booting with the External Harddrive plugged in, and another USB device unplugged and see if it still has issues. This will at least help you determine if it a problem with the harddrive itself, or just something wonky regarding how you computer is handling usb devices in general. Not really sure what to do after that point though.
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Rachel Mae
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| | | | | Originally posted by BlackNemesis13
Is the External Harddrive the only USB device you have hooked up to your computer?
At the moment, yes. I had initially booted up the system with only the bare essentials connected, just to make sure it survived the move, and that's when I noticed the problem.
Originally posted by Surlent
You could also check the Event Log, maybe it spits out some error, look for critical errors, usually marked with a white X on red ground.
Nothing out of the ordinary there, though I'm not surprised since it never gets past the Windows logo. 
I wonder if this technically isn't a complete lockup, but rather a really long delay as it searches for the drive? Maybe next time I reboot, I'll disconnect the drive again and wait a few minutes.
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Bagel
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| Posted on 09-06-10 10:26:15 PM (last edited by Bagel at 09-06-10 07:27 PM) |
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This is a pretty strange problem, usually it's the external hard disk that prevents a successful boot.
Your problem could be an issue with the boot manager or MBR, in which case you'd need a Windows XP installation disc to boot into the recovery console to run fixboot and/or fixmbr.
A secondary thing which probably won't fix the problem, but is slightly possible because I have seen this happen before:
If you open up the Administrative Tools and look at the Disk Management application in the Status area, it's possible that the drives marked BOOT and SYSTEM are wrong -- they should be both on the same disk, the internal one.
The problem is that some major updates, like the updater to Service Pack 2/3, or the Windows base installation itself, might not have the disks listed internally as the same order as they'd appear to the BIOS; essentially Windows tries to install itself to whatever disk seems to be the active boot disk but sometimes judges which disk incorrectly. Occasionally this bug can cause people to be unable to boot without the Windows installation disc inserted, too, because the system has the disc set up as SYSTEM and the internal drive as BOOT. (Counterintuitively, Windows looks to start up from the SYSTEM drive and searches for the Windows directory on BOOT.)
tl;dr you could have ended up with the invisible \boot directory (containing boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com) installed to your external drive by mistake during some update sometime. Running fixboot with the external drive disconnected should fix it.
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Rachel Mae
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| Posted on 09-07-10 12:12:31 AM (last edited by Gunstar Green at 09-07-10 12:28 AM) |
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| | | | | Hmmm...you know, I just might have installed the SP3 update from the external drive, since it had the most free space at the time. Maybe the installer did get confused and break something. I'll check a few things when I get home.
[EDIT]
Stuff (Z:)
232.88 GB NTFS
Healthy
Nope, guess that's not it. C: (WIN2K) is System, E: (WINXP) is Boot, as expected. Both of these (along with D:) are on the same internal drive, so there aren't any drive letter-shuffling issues going on.
No odd references to drive Z: in the registry, either, aside from some MRU lists and Photoshop crap, neither of which would halt the bootloader. Back to square one...
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