Boot time extremely slow when external hd connected

Hi,I have windows 7 installed, and the boot up time was under 1 min, i noticed when i connected my external hard drive it will go through the normal bootup checks and then i get a black screen with a white curser that blinks in the top left corner of the screen.It says on this blank screen section for at least 2 minutes then it with resume booting to the windows logo screen.I have the latest bios on my computer and the drivers for the hard drive is up to date. my mother board is an asus m3a7-em with the lastest bios, and the external hard drive is a
seagate barracuda 7200.10 500630
(ST350063 0AS USB) 500 GIG

Ive googled this issue online and no one has found a solution other than unpluging it before i turn my computer on which is annoying. any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.thank you

Here is your support page :
ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
You might check downloads to see you have the latest drivers, or download your manual, and check for bios settings.
Check you have the latest bios installed.
Join the asus forum and do a search - type in your motherboards name.
Forums : ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Forum-

i have dont that already.

usb enabled under boot options in bios? I had to disconnect mine b/c it couldn't find mbr on external and just sat there.

i have it dissabled in the bios boot options, the only thing i have enabled is the hard drive that my os is on.

Hi there
depending on what was on the external USB drive and whether it's a Primary partition at boot time the system is just going through it's start up routine. sometimes with plugged in external HDD's it has to look for and load extra drives at start up time.

It's best usually when booting to disconnect any portable USB devices first and plug them in afterwards - especially if there is also a NON windows file system on them too such as a Linux partition.

After boot the "plug 'n play" routines are already part of the Kernel and will have been loaded. At BOOT these aren't yet fully loaded and if they need to be called during the part of the boot process it will slow down boot for a while in some cases.

Nothing to worry about however --the system isn't broken.

Cheers
jimbo

the thing is ive made sure that the bios setting dont look for any other device to boot from other the the harddrive with my operating system on it, also i just tried connecting the same external drive to my my laptop which is running 7 ultimate 32 bit, and it loading up under a minute with no delays. so that makes me think it has something to do with a bios setting/or setting in the operation system on my desktop.

try disabling your autorun

just tried that no change.

Have you tried switching the port that the USB cable is plugged into? do you have any other external devices that you could test it's functionality with? ex: ipod, camera, printer etc...


Also, that drive sounds like it's trying to be a master drive. I'm wondering if there are a jumper or pin set that needs to be switched to 'slave'.