Thread: Booting Problem

I have a Pentium 4 system (2.8 GHz HT processor, 1 GB DDR1 RAM, Intel 865GBF motherboard). I have a single OS Windows XP (SP3) loaded on it. I have recently purchased an external USB hard drive (Seagate FreeAgent 1 TB), only to increase the storage capacity for my desktop.

However, whenever switch on my computer with the hard drive connected to the USB port, the screen freezes at the Intel P4 screen and the as does not boot at all. Without the hard drive connected during startup, the boot is normal. I have disabled the USB booting option in the BIOS setup. Now when I switch on my computer, there are following two scenarios:

1. If I simply restart the PC, then the original problem still persists and the screen freezes at the initial Intel Pentium 4 logo.

2. If I shut down the system (including shutting down the power supply to the external HDD) and then start again, the system proceeds to boot, but there is a delay of almost a minute and the screen goes blank between the loading of the OS and appearance of the XP logon screen.

I have undone the changes done in the BIOS setup and now I have to always physically disconnect the drive before bootup and than reconnect it. I would like my system to boot normally with the external hard drive always connected without any screen freezes or delays. Please guide me with understanding of the problem and help 'me with a solution to it.

If you have disabled USB booting, that itself should stop the drive from booting. Set your internal drive to boot first. If the external drive still boots, set the next boot drive as your internal hard drive. That should hopefully fix things. If that doesn't help either, maybe it's a bug with the motherboard. Look for a BIOS update and see if there are any bug fixes for it. If yes, then flash the BIOS. Remember that this is a Frisky thing to do and you can end up spoiling the board.

it souds good!