Question External drive boot issue

[vwcrusher]

I have a problem with booting that I have not able to remedy. When booting for some reason it seems like the system is trying to boot off of the external drive. It flashes for like 30 sec and once 'done' the system immediately comes up.

I looked at the boot sequence in BIOS and its certainly not first; my NVMe SSD is.

Would love some insight how I can configure this system so the external drive is just that...a back up drive.

If it might help, the system is as follows:
R7-3700 CPU
Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus MB
32GB RAM
500GB NVMe SSD - W10 and Apps
1TB NVMe SSD - data
4TB WD My Book external USB 3.0 - back up

Thanks!

 

[ultrasuzike]

if you remove the external drive and then boot does it all go smoothly?

 

[onespeedbiker]

Check if the external drive has an active partition. If it does mark the drive as inactive. http://www.bradleyschacht.com/mark-a-disk-partition-as-inactive/

 

[vwcrusher]

if you remove the external drive and then boot does it all go smoothly?

I should have noted that if I remove power from the ext drive, all goes smoothly..if that changes anything.

 

[vwcrusher]

Check if the external drive has an active partition. If it does mark the drive as inactive. http://www.bradleyschacht.com/mark-a-disk-partition-as-inactive/

Thanks for the suggestion...I have gotten to the part where I have two disks listed, the first seems like it the C drive, and Disk 2 is clearly the external. The issue is that I am not sure how to apply the procedure you suggested.....

 

[vwcrusher]

@onespeedbiker,

Followed the instructions to the letter and it made no difference.
Do I need to unapply the change I made?

Any other suggestions?

thanks

 

[onespeedbiker]

No, unless you need to boot from the exterior drive. If this did not solve your issue, it is probably not trying to boot from the exterior drive; just to be sure, unplug the exterior drive, and see if it solves the issue (this should have been my first suggestion). In that case, it is probably an issue with trying to load a errant driver. Follow the instructions in this link for a clean boot. https://www.windowscentral.com/how-clean-boot-windows-10 if this fixes you issue, you need to start adding services until the problem appears, and then either fix or disable the problem driver.

 

[wpgwpg]

It could be that when you boot Windows is just reading the label of the external drive as it always does.

 

[vwcrusher]

Thanks for the replies....I actually had a conversation with the MB and drive tech support. Asus was stymied, no idea why, so the tech I talked with bounced it up to the engineers.

The tech I spoke with at WD told me that all their USB drives self mount and the os will take time to get them listed.....whether it is done during boot up or after.....my drive is an older model and takes more time. His suggestion was to not have the drive (it is for data back up) powered up during boot, or for that matter at all, other when it will be backing up data.

Who knew? Anyway that's the manufacturer's response.....

 

[smithmd1]

I had an issue with my bios hanging during boot if my external HD was connected. I was able to fix the issue by disabling "Fast Startup" in windows 10 power settings.