Problem booting into Windows 7 when external hard drive is plugged in

Megahertz07 said:

Did you buy the drive from a reseller or second hand?

Did you clean the drive when you first install?

Please provide the full specs of the drive with it's reference code.

Please post a whole window Disk Manager image of ALL your drives. Don't forget to expand the columns so we can read them. How to Post a Screenshot of Disk Management

If you have a MiniTool or AOMEI Partition use it instead or Windows disk manager.

For a 2.5" USB HDD that is excellent. The bottle neck isn't the communication (USB 3.0) but the drive itself.

Enabling write caching on the device is cosmetic and a danger. It doesn't improve the writing speed. Instead of writing directly to the drive it writes to a cache file on the main drive. When it finish writing to the cache file it seems that the task is done but in fact it is still copying from the cache file to the USB drive. It is danger because you think the writing to the disk is done when it isn't. If you disconnect the drive you can corrupt the file system. That is why write caching on external devices are normally disable.

Thanks for your reply and suggestions.

The drive was brand new from Curry's.

When I first installed the drive, the drive was clean apart from a few proprietary files from Seagate, such as links to its home page and file management software. Also, the drive was working well. I even rebooted the computer without any problems. It was only when I changed the setting in the device Manager, as described above that there was a problem. When I changed the setting to "Better performance", and "Enable write-caching", it said I needed to restart the computer for the modification to take effect. That's when I found that when it rebooted, it immediately froze on the motherboard's splash screen.

Earlier this evening, I used Acronis True Image Home to install a disk image of my operating system from January, earlier this year. When the new image was installed, I restarted the computer with the Seagate Hard Drive's USB cable plugged in, but it made the boot-up process freeze again, in the same part of the process, right at the start of booting. When I unplug the USB cable and reboot, Windows 7 starts fine, and if I plug the Seagate external hard drive's USB cable in after successfully booting up, it still works normally.

I wish I didn't change the setting in the Device Manager, as described above, as that's obviously what's the caused problem.

As I used the MBR from the operating system's disk image from last January, I guess that I can deduct that the problem is not in the MBR, nor in registry, or anywhere in the Windows 7 operating system. The problem must therefore be in the bios?

The only things I can think of that I haven't tried so far are changing the drive letter of the Seagate USB external hard drive, and completely erasing the drive and reformatting it to NFTS (at the moment, it is exFAT. This would also get rid of the external hard drive's partition where its MBR is, in case anything bad is lurking there?

I don't have MiniTool or AOMEI Partition, so here's a screenshot of my Windows 7 Disk Manager, showing all my drives:

Disk 0 is G (internal HDD)
Disk 1 is C (OS SSD Drive)
Disk 2 is E (internal HDD)
Disk 3 is D (internal HDD)
Disk 4 is J (WD external USB hard drive, installed for several years with no problem)
Disk 5 is H (Seagate external USB Hard Drive, installed for several years with no problem)
Disk 6 is I (Seagate external USB Drive that's giving the problem)

Your drive 1 Windows drive is Legacy MBR.
Bingo
Your drive 6 has a EFI partition. EFI partitions has the Boot Manager for boot able UEFI - GPT drives.
It is also formatted as exFAT. Do you have a MAC?
Did you ever installed Windows on it?

My suggestion is to clean the drive and format as NTFS.
ALL DATA ON DRIVE 6 WILL BE ERASED

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the data drive number. It's probably 6)
select disk n (replace n by the data drive number obtained with list disk)
clean
create part primary
select part 1
format fs=NTFS quick
assign letter=I
exit (to exit diskpart)

Megahertz07 said:

Your drive 1 Windows drive is Legacy MBR.
Bingo
Your drive 6 has a EFI partition. EFI partitions has the Boot Manager for boot able UEFI - GPT drives.
It is also formatted as exFAT. Do you have a MAC?
Did you ever installed Windows on it?

My suggestion is to clean the drive and format as NTFS.
ALL DATA ON DRIVE 6 WILL BE ERASED

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (it will list all drives. Identify the data drive number. It's probably 6)
select disk n (replace n by the data drive number obtained with list disk)
clean
create part primary
select part 1
format fs=NTFS quick
assign letter=I
exit (to exit diskpart)

Thanks for your reply. When I first plugged in the external hard drive, I noticed that it was formatted as exFAT. On the Seagate website, it says that it's latest external hard drives are now formatted in this way:

Link: How to format your drive | Support Seagate US

Newer Seagate and LaCie branded external drives come preformatted with the exFAT file system, which allows it to be used on both Mac and Windows without reformatting the drive.

I'll follow your advice to clean the drive and format as NTFS, using diskpart and the method you suggested, which is the same method that Seagate is suggesting right down as the bottom of the "How to..." page, and will report back!

- - - Updated - - -

Update:

Thank you, Megahertz07

I formatted the external hard drive following your instructions using diskpart. I then rebooted the computer, and voila, it worked... Windows booted up with the external hard drive's USB cable plugged in, success! The problem is now resolved, thank you!

However, I seem to have a new challenge... the properties for the external hard drive shows that there is now only 2TB of available space on the drive, but the drive should have close to 8TB, as it's an 8TB drive. Is there a way of utilising more of the disk, please, so it's closer to the 8TB capacity?

Here's a screenshot of the file system in Windows 7 Disk Management, taken after the formatting (the Seagate external hard disk drive is now marked as Disk 5, whereas before, it was Disk 6, but it is still allocated with the letter I, same as before the formatting):

The drive you bought was somehow used as a UEFI boot able drive as it had a EFI partition.

The limitation of 2T is a characteristic of a MBR drive, not a GPT.

Another reason could be that the drive is Advanced Formatted (AF) that use a different cluster size on a MBR drive.
Does the label of the drive has an AF on it?

What are the full specs of the drive (Brand, model, code)?

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (See if on the GPT colums it has an * on the drive)
exit

Megahertz07 said:

The drive you bought was somehow used as a UEFI boot able drive as it had a EFI partition.

The limitation of 2T is a characteristic of a MBR drive, not a GPT.

Another reason could be that the drive is Advanced Formatted (AF) that use a different cluster size on a MBR drive.
Does the label of the drive has an AF on it?

What are the full specs of the drive (Brand, model, code)?

Open a CMD window as administrator and type:

diskpart
list disk (See if on the GPT colums it has an * on the drive)
exit

It turned out the drive was in the MBR format, so I deleted the volume and using Windows 7 Disk Management tool, converted the drive to GTP, which immediately restored it to its full capacity of just under 8TB, and thanks to your previous tip, I can still reboot without having to unplug the USB cable. Thank you, Megahertz07.

The problem's resolved and am very gratefull for all the help in this thread, thanks.

Glad to know you fix it.

I hope you're going to use the drive as a backup of the other drives you have.

NEVER, ever, trust a drive to save files you can't loose. Soon or later all drives will fail.
Remember that a HDD has an arm moving very, very close to the disk surface. Once running, don't move it, don't even touch it.
Always have a backup.

Megahertz07 said:

Glad to know you fix it.
I hope you're going to use the drive as a backup of the other drives you have.
NEVER, ever, trust a drive to save files you can't loose. Soon or later all drives will fail.
Always have a backup.

You guessed correctly... I got a large drive to back up all the others!

Thanks again for your help. I made a silly mistake messing with the write policy in the Device Manager but I learned a lot in the process.

Can't believe my first drive was a floppy disk drive!