Odd startup sequence

[scoobydog]

Howdy

Ive been doing some work on my friends computer. He has a Gigabyte Ultra Durable 3 Motherboard. (he has windows 7 ultimate x86)

Firstly when you start it up it goes to the Gigabyte Ultra Durable 3 screen (normal) and then the display flashes off and then the Gigabyte Durable 3 screen comes back and then it goes to the DMI pool screen and then it says starting windows. Then the monitor turns off and then say 30 seconds later the monitor comes back on and it goes welcome screen and then desktop. All in all it gets there.

My computer on the other hand (I have Windows 7 Home premium x64) also Gigabyte Durable 3 Mboard does it all in one smooth motion, no loss of monitor part way through.

Now I know this is not hard disk/windows related as I have been through a massive post with the guys over at Setup and Installation and they have put me though the works.

Now his 2 external drives are on all the time. It was only though an accident that I had them turned off today and did a reboot then wola the start up sequence was perfect.

So this is it. External drives on, dodgy start up. External drives off, perfect start up

What do you think of that?

Thanks

 

[TVeblen]

What is on those external drives? Any operating systems?

Check to see if any of the partitions on the external drives are marked ACTIVE in Disk Management. Or post a screenshot of the Disk Management window, expanded to show all, with all externals connected.

 

[alphanumeric]

Check the BIOS to see what the first boot device, or boot device order is? Make sure the first boot device is set to the internal hard drive. It may be trying to boot from a USB device and then just moves on to what ever is set next until it finds a bootable device. Someone may have booted from a thumb drive etc and forgot to switch the BIOS back to the hard drive.

 

[neo101]

My thinking too
- the way it switches monitor off-on.

2x Bios chips onboard like other Gigabyte?

Could even be borked bios chip#1 / update / setting stops it starting
> it swiches to boot (auto) from spare bios#2 chip
= monitor goes off.

Shot in dark - haven't used that board yet

When you (first time) boot these type of boards - you know you have to leave them alone - to go thru auto-setup/discover

- they then auto-restart then you go in bios and fiddle!

 

[scoobydog]

The boot order is CD first, HHD 2nd. I don't know about the chip thing but I do know if you turn the externals of the start up sequence is spot on. It has also been pointed out to me the OS should be in disk 0

No OS's on externals, purely data, but there does seem to be leftover OS on 1.8TB drive.

Here is a screen shot.

 

[alphanumeric]

The OS doesn't have to be disk O, but the boot order has to be pointed to the correct hard drive if there is more than one physical internal drive. My BIOS will list the two drives and let me select which one is to be the boot drive. Switching the order to hard drive first from CD-ROM will speed things up some. My BIOS has a one time quick boot option that will let me boot from a thumb drive or CD/DVD that one boot. After that it goes back to the preset hard drive. The only time I would boot from a CD/DVD would be on a reinstall so why waste time checking for a Bootable CD on every boot. I just use the BIOS quick boot menu.

 

[neo101]

H/drives set up weird (C: isnt on sata cable 0 where it usualy looks first)

With boot from cd first order
- if anything like Win 7 is sitting in your cd/dvd players it will try starting the system from there or fail booting if another type cd interferes

 

[TVeblen]

OK. See that Drive 0 (D: )? That partition is marked ACTIVE. This is telling the system that there is a bootable OS on that drive, but there isn't. So it could be hanging while the problem is resolved.

I would remove the ACTIVE flag from that drive and see if that clears up the problem.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/197157-partition-mark-inactive.html