Question Laptop won't boot up until external drive is connected

[ProgrammerDude95]

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 that's about 4 years old, running Windows 10. I've recently started having a strange problem: I'll shut down (not sleep) my laptop, then when I hit the power button, nothing happens except a quick "blip" of light from the power LED. Doesn't matter if I press it or hold it down a while--I've tried between 5-60 seconds with no difference.

The only thing I've found that fixes it is to plug in my two external hard drives. After I plug them in, I can hit the power button and it boots up normally.

This isn't consistent either: I've tried to reproduce by shutting down, disconnecting the drives, then booting up and it will sometimes work. I wonder if it only happens if I let time go by, maybe waiting until the next day--haven't tested this.

Another detail: I just recently installed an antivirus program: Kaspersky Security Cloud, free version. The problem started happening sometime after I installed. Not sure if it's related, but maybe?

When I go into Boot Option Priorities, here is my list:
1: Windows Boot Manager
2: Onboard NIC (IPV4)
3: Onboard NIC (IPV6)

Any idea what the cause might be? Could the OS be getting stuck on some boot-up-related file on the external drives? Could it be an antivirus thing?

 

[Colif]

can you attach both external drives
right click start
choose disk management
expand the window so we can see both the free space on all partitions at the top and it shows the details of the drives in the bottom half
take a screenshot and upload to an image sharing website
show link here

its likely one of the 2 drives includes a boot partition and the Windows Boot Manager has a record of it, as it stores the information of any bootable devices attached to it.

Do you happen to know who makes the boot drive in the PC?

 

[ProgrammerDude95]

Screenshot of Disk Management link is here:

If I understand your question about who makes the boot drive, when I go into the boot settings screen, in the left corner it says Dell, Inc. and in the right corner it says Aptio Setup Utility - American Megatrends, Inc.