[SOLVED] External boot drive keeps acting like a boot device

[JohnnyMaverick]

I've got a custom built PC with a Gigabyte motherboard Z-270 chipset. OS is Win7 Pro 64-bit.

I've got 3 external USB drives plugged into my PC. 1 of them keeps thinking that it's a boot drive and inserts itself into the dialogue every time I boot up the PC. The external drive in question is a Western Digital Passport drive like this one except it's 3 TB capacity. I got sick of this problem and decided to disable the USB boot feature through the BIOS menu options. The darn thing still thinks it's a boot drive. It's a complete PITA for me to physically disconnect the drive everytime I reboot the PC and plug it back in after it boots up again.

The drive contains a mish mash collection of photos, videos, documents and text files. There is absolutely nothing that I can think of that I saved previously that would cause this behavior. None of my other external HDDs behave this way.

Question: Is there a free utility that can analyze this sucker and possible remove the boot flag from it?

I could possible "nuke & pave" it but I then would have to find a suitable drive to offload the data that's on there currently to back it up. It's not something i really want to do - I'm in between moves and finding a large enough HDD would be a huge hassle.

 

[Colif]

can you show us a screenshot of disk management with the partitions on that drive showing?
upload to an image sharing website and show link here.

 

[JohnnyMaverick]

Yes here it is.

oh crud... Imgur keeps resizing the image for some reason. I'll have to use another upload service. Will be right back.

OK, here it is hosted from a different website:

https://ibb.co/Sst0Fkt

 

[Colif]

so its 1 partition, that doesn't explain it then.. thought it might have an extra partition on it.
its not marked as system so thats another reason gone...

google is just showing me the opposite result to what i am searching. I think it does it on purpose... how dare I want to find things, why won't i just use it to buy stuff... sorry. It happens too often.

 

[JohnnyMaverick]

Just to prove my suspicion that it's the USB drive at fault and not my motherboard, I'm gonna test this drive out on a very old PC. It's not very stable, but it will hold up for at least a few minutes while I do this testing. If the same problem persists, I''ll definitely prove my suspicions that there's something going on with the drive itself.

 

[Colif]

unless the windows boot manager has it included in the boot list, and I don't know it would, i don't know how the bios would try to boot from it. it shouldn't be able to over ride the preset boot list.

have you looked in MSConfig Boot tab? there should only be 1 windows in there