USB Drive Blocks Bootup

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February 29th, 2008, 06:50 PM
nihil

USB Drive Blocks Bootup

This is a really weird one (to me at least).

I have a number of USB ("thumb" or "pen") drives. They are Ridata, Peak and two Maxells.

I have a machine booting Windows 2000 (P4 2.26, 1Gb PC2700). It is at SP4 and fully patched.

If I insert any of the thumb drives they are recognised and work just fine. If I leave a Ridata or Peak drive connected and reboot it works just fine.

If I boot with either of the Maxell drives connected it gets as far as recognising the processor (before the health and memory test) then freezes.

If I remove the Maxell drive, it unfreezes and continues to boot as normal.

My wife also has a machine with Windows 2000 at the same status. It will boot perfectly normally with either of the Maxell drives attached.

Anyone come across anything like that?
February 29th, 2008, 07:08 PM
moxquito

Have you comparted the 2 differnt BIOS's, specifically with the Boot order, and HALT ON erros section "can't remember the name of it exactly :("

As far as why it hangs on the 2 Maxells and not the others, maybe there is something on those 2 drives specifically that your BIOS doesn't like.

Other than that, thats kind of a a messed up issue :(

Hope that helps :)
February 29th, 2008, 07:24 PM
morganlefay

Well recently I have had some really wierd things with USB and 2000.

Mostly USB2.0 PCI cards...and different chipsets...

So it doesnt surprise me one bit....

MLF
February 29th, 2008, 07:44 PM
thehorse13

I ran into this exact issue with a SanDisk usb stick a while back. Turned out, in my case, that the system was not able to determine if it should boot off the usb stick or the HD so it just hung. A flash BIOS update solved the issue for me.

--TH13
February 29th, 2008, 11:01 PM
nihil

@ mox~

Quote:

Have you comparted the 2 differnt BIOS's, specifically with the Boot order, and HALT ON erros section "can't remember the name of it exactly :("

Yes, they are the same: floppy, DVD/CD, HD0. No searching for other media.

Quote:

As far as why it hangs on the 2 Maxells and not the others, maybe there is something on those 2 drives specifically that your BIOS doesn't like.

It gets weirder.............. there are two USB ports at the front and two at the back. If I stick the Maxells in the rear ports it boots just fine!

They have some sort on management/encryption suite on them: Secret Zip v1.05
March 2nd, 2008, 05:06 PM
hexadecimal

A similar thing will happen whenever I reboot with my gen4 iPod.

it will hang until i unplug it.. as soon as its disconnected it boots normally.

I figured it was a problem with boot devices but I never really understood why.

Thats odd how the two USB panels give different results... different controllers maybe?

All I know is, I purchased a motherboard by ASUS, and never had a weird "now wtf.." problem again!... except when you dual channel ram without it matching EXACTLY.... talk about phantoms in the system!
March 2nd, 2008, 06:53 PM
nihil

The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-8SR533 and it has two USB controllers and root hubs. OK that gives me different interrupts and memory ranges, but I don't see why that would be a problem?

The only difference that I can see is that when the Maxell is attached to the pair that boots normally it is consuming 80mA but in the one that hangs it is 100mA. It is supposed to support 500mA per device.

Weird, but not a real problem.

The only reason I mentioned it is that I know people use these drives for diagnostic software and the like, and that some have been set up as boot devices.................... that wouldn't work in this situation, and if you tried a reboot after using the drive it wouldn't work, which would be confusing.