Why does my PC keep trying to boot from my external hard drives?

[klear6]

I have three external hard drives - 2 seagate ssds and one western digital hdd. Whenever they are plugged in to the computer and I restart it or power it on, it tries to boot from them and ends up giving me "non-system" disk error. Which really tends to freak a person out when setting up a computer off of ebay. I just got an HP6300 off ebay to fix up and so far so good *knock on wood* Its so nice to have a desktop again....Got off topic, sorry - So if I unplug the drives it boots normally, which is good. But I'd rather not have to keep reaching behind to plug and unplug them every time i start the computer. So I tried the same thing on my older laptop (Presario cq60) and it does the same thing - even though I arranged the boot order to prefer the internal drive. Why is this happening? And it always says my drives need to be scanned, so I cleared one off and formatted it and it doesn't say that any more - however, I don't have room to back up the stuff from the other 2 drives so that i can format them and need another way to fix this. They work just fine, no slowness and so far I haven't seen any corrupted data or anything. But that damn message won't stop popping up "Your drive needs to be fixed - Scan and fix now?" No. The last time I listened to that message I ened up with a blank drive in the end so just, no. At least not until I can back the stuff up. In the mean time is there another way to fix it or to just turn off the message?
klear6

PS Windows 7 Pro

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

My PC boot process halts at the mobo splash-screen if I leave an external HDD plugged in from previous Windows session.

Only fix for me is to make sure external HDDs are unplugged before powering on my PC.

Actually I've found a more convenient fix - - I always put my PC to sleep now instead of shutting it down, problem fixed.

Believe me, I've looked all over the BIOS settings (and tried all relevant ones) - - - nada.

Just put your PC to sleep - - - added benefit is that PC is ready to use in five seconds max.

 

[mwryder55]

Is it configured in the BIOS to boot from USB devices before the internal hard drive? I normally disable booting from USB devices at all to prevent problems with infected devices.