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

Hello,

I hope someone can help... I bought a new Seagate Expansion hard drive with 8GB capacity. I plugged it into the mains, and plugged its USB cable into my desktop computer's USB port. When I started the computer, everything booted up normally, and I could see that the new Seagate HD was recognised and was working fine. In Windows Explorer, I could copy, paste and delete files normally.

The file transfer rate for copying files onto the Seagate Hard Drive (USB v.30) was about 70MB/S. I thought that was a bit slow, as the Seagate was plugged into the motherboard's USB port that was USB 3.0, so I was expecting a faster date transfer speed.

After doing some research online, I learned that you can improve the data transfer speed by changing a Policy setting in the Device Manager, for the Seagate external hard drive. By default, the removal policy was set to the "Quick removal (default)" setting. From what I had read, changing the policy setting to "Better performance", and then in the sub-category, putting a tick in the option that says, "Enable write caching on the device", can improve the drive's data transfer speed, so that's what I did. A dialogue box popped up telling me I needed to reboot the computer for the change to take effect, so I clicked "Yes".

When the computer switched off, it automatically tried to reboot, but immediately the booting-up process froze, and nothing happened. If I turn off the computer, and unplug the Seagate external hard drive's USB cable, the computer boots up perfectly, and once I'm into the operating system (Windows 7), all is good. When I then plug the Seagate external hard drive's USB cable into the computer's USB port, again all is good, and I can see the drive in Windows Explorer, and I can copy, paste and delete files. Everything is normal.

If I turn off the computer and reboot with the Seagate external hard drive's USB cable still plugged in, the booting-up process freezes again on the first splash screen.

So basically, I can use the Seagate external Hard Drive normally, but only if I plug it in after the computer has fully booted up. I thought something might have happened to the external Hard Drive after I changed its setting in the Device Manager, so I took it back to the shop where I bought it from, and they exchanged it for a new hard drive... same make and specifications as the original... but the new replacement drive also causes the computer to freeze on start-up. The computer freezes too early to be able to access the bios, but I can access the bios if I unplug the external hard Drive's USB cable.

What could the problem be?

Thank you!

samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. First thing check the bios disk setting is it set to boot from usb first or the hard drive?

Thanks for your welcome and reply. I have checked that USB isn't selected first in the boot order in the bios, and it wasn't. The first boot device is my C drive which is correct as it has the OS.

I was thinking that because I changed the policy setting in the Device Manager that was originally set at "Quick removal (default)" - does that mean the drive was a 'hot swap' drive. By changing the policy to "Better performance" -> "Enable write caching on the device", I wonder if I did something to the bios whereby it disabled the 'hot swap' function. When I changed the policy back to "Quick removal (default)", it might not have updated the bios. I'm not very knowledgeable of things to do with the bios, so I don't want to go changing things and then making things worse!

Some suggestions:

1) change the Device Manager setting back to "Quick Removal", reboot and see if the freeze-on-boot issue disappears. One would expect it to as that is where you started. Copy some largish file from the C drive to the external Seagate and record the time this takes to complete or maybe just note the copy speed

2) again, change the Device Manager back to "Better Performance" (this actually caches the drive in RAM). Reboot and then plug the Seagate in. Re-perform the largish file copy and time this to completion. If improvement in performance timing is worth it, then a reasonable possibility could be to just leave plug-in of the cached external Seagate till after boot.

3) possibly, the issue is insufficient RAM in your PC, or perhaps power supply from the USB port is inadequate when the RAM cache is being deployed. I have several external WD disks that suffer from this issue - my resolution was to install a USB3 hub powered from the mains, rather than just plug-in separately as needed.

ian50 said:

Some suggestions:

1) change the Device Manager setting back to "Quick Removal", reboot and see if the freeze-on-boot issue disappears. One would expect it to as that is where you started. Copy some largish file from the C drive to the external Seagate and record the time this takes to complete or maybe just note the copy speed

2) again, change the Device Manager back to "Better Performance" (this actually caches the drive in RAM). Reboot and then plug the Seagate in. Re-perform the largish file copy and time this to completion. If improvement in performance timing is worth it, then a reasonable possibility could be to just leave plug-in of the cached external Seagate till after boot.

3) possibly, the issue is insufficient RAM in your PC, or perhaps power supply from the USB port is inadequate when the RAM cache is being deployed. I have several external WD disks that suffer from this issue - my resolution was to install a USB3 hub powered from the mains, rather than just plug-in separately as needed.

Thanks for your suggestions. At this point, I'm not concerned about the data transfer speed as I'd just like to be able to boot up with the Seagate external hard drive plugged in with the USB cable. Changing the Device manager settings back to "Quick Removal" didn't solve the problem.

Something else I'm about to try...

I don't have Windows 7 restoration enabled, so have no restore points, but I have an Acronis disk image of my operating system from January, so I'll install that and will report back.
If the problem continues, would that totally rule out a problem with the registry and the operating system? In other words, would it mean that the only place there is a problem is in the bios?

Anyhow, I'll install the image of the OS from January and see what happens.

Your OP did express concern over the speed of the external disk, although you say that isn't important.

If the PC freezes on boot with the external disk already plugged into a USB port, cached in RAM or not, it seems likely you have your BIOS (or EUFI) set to boot off the USB port before the internal C drive. If so, just change the boot order.

ian50 said:

Your OP did express concern over the speed of the external disk, although you say that isn't important.
If the PC freezes on boot with the external disk already plugged into a USB port, cached in RAM or not, it seems likely you have your BIOS (or EUFI) set to boot off the USB port before the internal C drive. If so, just change the boot order.

I mentioned the data transfer speed being slow because I had to explain the reason how I got into the situation where my external hard drive was causing Windows 7 to freeze in the early stages of booting up. The slow data transfer speed is an issue, but has since become only a secondary issue. Sorry for the confusion.

I have checked the bios to make sure that it's not trying to boot off the USB port before the internal hard drive where my operating system is located, which is the C Drive, and it is definitely set to boot of the C drive first. Thanks for the reply.

- - - Updated - - -

Robo717 said:

I don't have Windows 7 restoration enabled, so have no restore points, but I have an Acronis disk image of my operating system from January, so I'll install that and will report back.
If the problem continues, would that totally rule out a problem with the registry and the operating system? In other words, would it mean that the only place there is a problem is in the bios?
Anyhow, I'll install the image of the OS from January and see what happens.

Update:

Using Acronis True Image Home, I tried installing the image of the OS from January, but in the recovery console that appears during the booting up process, it says it can't find any disk drives, which is interesting.

Could this mean that my MBR (Master Boot Record) is damaged on Drive C (which houses the Windows 7 operating system)?

Should I try to repair MBR or could that make matters worse, or is that just not the problem anyway?

Robo717 if it were me I would NOT try to recover to a January image, as at least in my case there will have been dozens of program changes and hundreds of files that would be affected going back that far! I'd leave that alone for the time being anyway, and until I find a solution to the boot issue I would just plug the new drive after bootup.

When you enabled "Better performance" and "Enable write-caching" did you try also "Turn off Windows write-cache..."? Just a shot in the dark...

I feel you will get this fixed and when you do, you should turn On System Protection i.e. Restore Points.

maxseven said:

Robo717 if it were me I would NOT try to recover to a January image, as at least in my case there will have been dozens of program changes and hundreds of files that would be affected going back that far! I'd leave that alone for the time being anyway, and until I find a solution to the boot issue I would just plug the new drive after bootup.

Regarding recovering to a January image, as long as it fixes the external hard drive freezing Windows 7 during booting up, I don't mind having to update all changes I've made to computer since then. Those would be challenges I could deal with as I've done that many times before with Windows 7 over the past 14 years I've had the operating system. I'm just wondering if recovering the image backup from January is likely to solve the problem. If it may do, I'd be prepared to take the risk.

maxseven said:

When you enabled "Better performance" and "Enable write-caching" did you try also "Turn off Windows write-cache..."? Just a shot in the dark..

So far, I haven't tried putting a tick in "Turn off Windows write-cache...". I haven't used the option yet, is that something I should try, and if I do, should I also put a tick in the box "Enable write-caching"?

maxseven said:

I feel you will get this fixed and when you do, you should turn On System Protection i.e. Restore Points.

Thanks for your help and encouraging comment.