Don’t Reboot with that Hard Drive Attached via USB!
This summer I have become a major fan of those great little portable hard drives from Western Digital that plug in to your computer or laptop via USB. I have one for music, and another for videos, and yet another for important documents, bills, files, etc.
I’m addicted. There’s something fantastic about being able to visually organize your hard drives and benefit from the inexpensive and fast little hard drive that takes up no space hardly in your back pack or desk.
That said, it can be a major mistake to reboot or start up your pc computer or laptop with one of those great little drives attached. This can be a sure fire way of passing on a virus to your machine or cranking up a nice little systems error as your machine gets confused by the hard drives listed in its BIOS.
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“…cranking up a nice little systems error as your machine gets confused by the hard drives listed in its BIOS.”
I’m trying to format my brother’s computer and install WinXP overtop of his Vista, but when I run the bootdisk and it tries to start the setup that would allow me to format partitions, it instead gives me an error saying that Windows has detected a problem and has stopped.
Under a little investigation, I’ve discovered that his system is showing 4 additional removable hard drives which the computer seems to think are connected to it…after speaking with him, this may have been caused by the issue you mentioned above as he has a USB external hard drive which more than once has likely been plugged in when he booted up.
My question is, how do you resolve the issue mentioned above and get the BIOS to stop thinking it has additional hard drives?
thanks,
Devan
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I think you may need to do some additional trouble shooting to confirm that the ‘drives’ you see are really removable drives and not partition drives as you mention earlier in your comment.
That said, if it is removable hard drives, you might need to ‘remove hardware’ and try and get whatever is showing up off of there.
If its a legacy partition issue, that could be tougher and not something that I have as much experience with. I’m not suggesting that you do these next steps, but you might investigate them a bit to find the right path.
Since you are installing xp over vista, you may want to put in the original backup disk and take the computer back to its factory state, then install XP over vista.
Alternatively, you may need to format the drive (extreme, but sometimes necessary).
You may also want to look into the option of removing disk partitions (no idea if that is possible, but maybe if the partitions are the actual issue this could be a less drastic step than formatting a hard drive).
Again not my area, but these would probably be the options I’d try and investigate next.
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I actually would LOVE to just format the drive.
The way I’m used to doing that was from the Boot Disk though…and my bootdisk can’t even get to that stage before it crashes due to this multi-hard drive issue…not sure how else to format it.
I am positive they are not partitions by the way. My mention of partitions was only in lieu of the normal flow of the bootdisk setup and how I couldn’t get to that stage.
I have tried “uninstalling” them through the device manager…and they went away, only to return the next time I booted the computer.
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Maybe as an alternative, you could buy a new hard drive (somewhat wasteful, but being stuck for hours or days can be wasteful too) and copy over the important things from the old drive partitions into the new drive (possible with no or fewer partitions) and then start your task.
I feel like I’m grasping at straws to give you suggestions, but I personally only work with ‘hardware’ when I have to and much prefer software issues.
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Unfortunately, it seems the Hard Drive itself isn’t the issue.
Somehow it’s locked into the BIOS that these additional ghost drives exist and phantom themselves in whenever Windows starts up, or begins its setup from boot to install (which causes a blue screen of death that says Windows has detected an error and will shut down. Remove any additional hard-drives, check for corruption etc.)
I’ve since pulled the disc out and formatted it on my machine, I think I’m going to install XP on it on the other computer as well, then plug it back into the first and hope someone responds on the forums I’ve been posting to with a way to refresh or reset the BIOS properly and defeat this issue.
Brett’s comment above is the closest I’ve seen to what’s happening, I just wish he’d given detail on how to fix it
Anyways, thanks for your suggestions so far.
-Devan
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Hey Devan,
Sorry I couldn’t help more, but I’m definitely at the outer bounds of my own knowledge on this.
These portable drives are insanely convenient, but PCs definitely do not seem to be build to play nice with them. I’m going to try and move to a networked (ethernet connected) drive and see if I can then keep the connection a bit more stable in the future. Those things are not cheap though ($250) and so I’m not racing out to the store to attempt this just yet.
best regards,
brett
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