Can't boot if USB external drive attached

dancedar said:

Would have to check tomorrow - any specific hardware you'd need - assume ram and monitor make aren't important

Probably not but the more you can give us the better. It is a 64 bit OS so it should but...

Ken

To the OP. Please fill out you specs in lower left of one of your post. Giving a little piece of specs now and then will make it very hard for these people to help you.

Sorry - I'm not the OP so I'll try to flesh out my post a little:

Not my pc, so specs on Sat if I can -
Win XP Home 32 bit, about 6 yrs old, fairly well spec'd pc then as for photo work, all drives connected via back usb (no hubs) stripped everything else off to id the problem, single drive attached via usb 2 - drive is an external 1tb seagate freeagent w/ separate power supply, freshly formatted (not sure ntfs or fat/32).

Will try to post more info but no other drives stop pc from booting (though no drives are 1tb in size) and this same problematic drive allows a laptop to boot but not a desktop.

Thank you LiquidSnak. I missed that.

Windows 7 64bit, Asus Crosshair II formula mother board.
I have exactly same issue. With Western D Mybook, 1T attached to my computer, the computer fails to boot and freezes at the first page.
What I noticed tho, if I went to bios setting (hitting Del), then quit from it, the computer will boot successfully with this USB drive.
I've tried many things: Change priority of the boot device, enable or disable the USB legacy. This external hard drive won't freeze my another DELL computer, running Win7 64bit.

I am trying to update the BIOS, and hope it will help. Or if you guys have any suggestion, please let me know.
Thanks.

I had this same issue and struggled with it for days with no solutions... I tried changing the boot order, I tried to disable USB legacy support in my BIOS (which not only didn't fix the problem, but prevented Windows from loading even when I removed the expansion drive), and looked for updates for my BIOS (there weren't any).

As a last ditch effort, I went into the partition manager (the crappy one that comes with Windows 7) and turned my 2TB drive into four 500GB partitions. Problem solved. It boots fine.

Hope this helps the next victim of this problem...