Usb Boot Problem - Second Try At Posting.

[doctormann]

Hi

Sorry, something went wrong, I'll try again:

I'm having a bit of a problem with booting from a USB pen drive.

My system is pretty ancient - 2004 vintage - but still struggles along, running WinXP pro stably, for the most part.

The system has two 120GB HDDs, both partitioned into equal halves so I have:

A: 31/2 " Floppy drive.

C: An old XP Pro System - not currently in use.

D: A newer XP Pro System

E: Multimedia Storage - Music and some movies

F: Other Data Storage

G: DVD ROM Drive

H: DVD RW Drive

All these are IDE drives

Additionally, i have:

I: Set up as a RAM drive

J: Allocated to USB pen drive, when present.

K: 250 GB partition on an external USB2 HDD - WD My Passport Essentials - used for backup files.

L: 250 GB partition on the same WD USB2 HDD, used for movies, mainly.

Now, here's the story:

I was getting some BSOD problems - no consistency in the diagnostics - so decided to carry out a RAM test.

So, I changed the boot order in the BIOS to make the floppy drive the first boot device. I booted from the MemTest floppy with no problem and ran the test for several hours. No problems detected.

I then changed the boot order in the BIOS back so that the first boot device was USB HDD, as it had been previously. The second and third boot devices are CDROM and HDD0, - nothing has been changed here.

Now, when I boot the system i get an 'NTLDR missing' error message. However, if I boot the system with a pen drive - containing a Linux Ubuntu system - everything proceeds normally.

It appears to me that the BIOS is picking up the WD external drive, which does not have an OS on it, as the first boot device. Instead of then proceeding to try the next boot options and then loading the system from HDD0 it just stalls with the NTLDR error message.

If I disconnect the WD drive then the system boots off HDD0 normally.

Ii am wondering if the BIOS has somehow got corrupted? I am reluctant to flash the BIOS - dangerous at the best of times and I don't have the CMOS file anyway.

It's a puzzle - the only thing that I have knowingly changed is the boot order and this was changed back to its previous configuration after the memory test.

At the moment I'm working round the problem by disabling the first boot option so the BIOS checks for a CDROM, doesn't (normally) find one and so boots off HDD0. This works but is slightly inconvenient if I want to boot from a USB pen drive.

Any suggestions, anyone, short of binning the whole thing?

Thanks,

DM

[Dork]

Why do you set the USB HDD as the first boot device if you don't want to boot from it? Why not just set HDD0 as the first boot drive?

[doctormann]

Why do you set the USB HDD as the first boot device if you don't want to boot from it? Why not just set HDD0 as the first boot drive?

Because I am trying out various Linux distributions at the moment and these can generally be booted from a USB pen drive. It's inconvenient to have to change the boot order every time I want to do this. Agreed that if I always wanted to boot WinXP I would just set HDD0 to be the first boot device.

DM

[Chicog]

Why don't you just download Virtual Box and try your Linux distros in VM's?

[Dork]

Why do you set the USB HDD as the first boot device if you don't want to boot from it? Why not just set HDD0 as the first boot drive?

Because I am trying out various Linux distributions at the moment and these can generally be booted from a USB pen drive. It's inconvenient to have to change the boot order every time I want to do this. Agreed that if I always wanted to boot WinXP I would just set HDD0 to be the first boot device.

DM

OK but then I must be missing something. I've read your post a couple of times and to me you are saying that you have set the USB HDD as the first boot device and that when there is a USB HDD present then the system tries to boot from that.

Why are you surprised about that?

[doctormann]

Why don't you just download Virtual Box and try your Linux distros in VM's?

I guess that I could do but that's not really the point. I want to find out why a simple boot-order change - and subsequent reversion - has somehow screwed things up.

DM

[dharmabm]

Most machines have an f12 boot selection option at post for that purpose

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[doctormann]

Why do you set the USB HDD as the first boot device if you don't want to boot from it? Why not just set HDD0 as the first boot drive?

Because I am trying out various Linux distributions at the moment and these can generally be booted from a USB pen drive. It's inconvenient to have to change the boot order every time I want to do this. Agreed that if I always wanted to boot WinXP I would just set HDD0 to be the first boot device.

DM

OK but then I must be missing something. I've read your post a couple of times and to me you are saying that you have set the USB HDD as the first boot device and that when there is a USB HDD present then the system tries to boot from that.

Why are you surprised about that?

No surprise at all - I would expect the BIOS to try to boot from a USB device if one is present - and it does boot just fine from a USB pen drive that has an OS on it. What I don't expect is for the system to stall after finding a USB device with no OS on it. What it should do, and used to do, is to proceed to to the next boot device in the list, and so on, until it finds an OS to load. It's clearly not doing this any more.

DM

[JSixpack]

On older machines, if you set the boot order to boot first from the USB, then you later take out the USB and boot normally, the boot order will revert and you'll need to set it again to boot from the USB next time. So when you're trying out Linux distributions, put multiple distributions on a stick using YUMI and try them out serially to avoid the BIOS resets.

[doctormann]

Ok Guys, panic over, I've sorted it.

What seems to have happened is that K:, which is the first partition on the WD USB Drive had somehow become marked as 'active.' I have no idea how this came about - nothing that I did knowingly so maybe a glitch in the BIOS when I was changing the boot order.

The BIOS was indeed finding the WD drive as the first boot device, in the absence of a pen drive, and was looking for an OS on there, which wasn't there, hence the missing NTLDR error message. Apparently, in this condition, if the partition is marked as 'active' nothing proceeds. Marking the partition as 'inactive', which I did using diskpart from the command line, does not give the NTLDR error and allows the BIOS to proceed to the next boot device.

I now have USB HDD set as the first boot device and everything is back to normal.

Thanks for the help and useful suggestions.

DM

[Chicog]

And thanks for telling us the outcome, might come in handy one day

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