USB flash drive preventing POST, others work fine

[Dmanrocks22]

I have a Dell Studio 1555 Bios A13

I have three flash drives, one a 1gb HP flash drive, one a 2gb Sandisk Cruzer, and one a 16gb Patriot XT

When the HP 1gb drive and Sandisk 2gb are plugged in during boot, nothing happens. It POSTs fine and starts windows.

When the Patriot drive is plugged in during boot, the BIOS hangs 2/3rds of the way through POST.

I have tried multiple formatting schemes. Also note that there is absolutely nothing on any of these drives, they are empty and freshly formatted.

1gb formatted to FAT works, FAT32 works, exFAT works, all regardless of allocation size.

2gb formatted to FAT works, FAT32 works, exFAT works, all regardless of allocation size.

16gb formatted to FAT32 fails, exFAT fails, regardless of allocation size. I have tried a full (non-quick) format to check for bad sectors, to no avail. I have tried HP format tool rather than windows format tool, to no avail.

So at this point I'm thinking it's the Dell BIOS at fault here, and I'm going to have to dualboot instead of making a multiboot drive. If anybody can help suggestions would be great.

 

[badger906]

go into your bios and see if you have the option to boot from a flash drive, if you do disable it. then it should boot as normal, ignoring the flash drives until it reaches windows

 

[Dmanrocks22]

go into your bios and see if you have the option to boot from a flash drive, if you do disable it. then it should boot as normal, ignoring the flash drives until it reaches windows

Yes, and that works, but I'm doing this because I wanted to make a multiboot flash drive and that makes it useless for that purpose.

 

[patio]

What "used" to be on the 16G ? ?
Sounds like it was a boot able device at one point or if thats the one you were experimenting with to boot to the operation failed...even though it is showing as empty...

 

[HammerHead]

Load

Make it bootable and try it.

 

[Dmanrocks22]

What "used" to be on the 16G ? ?
Sounds like it was a boot able device at one point or if thats the one you were experimenting with to boot to the operation failed...even though it is showing as empty...

Indeed, but I deleted all of those files and then reformatted it completely, so I don't think that could be it.

If it is though, how can I fix it?