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Disable USB device booting in Windows 2000?

Cerb

Cerb

Elite Member
There's a 40GB internal drive, 80GB USB HDD, and USB CF reader. If either USB device is plugged in/turned on at boot, Windows gives a inaccessible boot device BSOD.
Short of using GRUB, is there anything that can be done to tell windows to use the real primary master, no just the first disk it finds?
 
Windows can't try to boot from any device unless the boot.ini file has a listing for it as a boot volume. This sounds more like the USB devices are causing some sort of compatibility issue simply by being plugged in and active, but it's not that Windows is trying to boot from either of them.
 
I have found that Some cheap USB devices will prevent a boot by hanging up the BIOS POST. Where the better devices will work fine. It isn't a matter of " Windows Booting from the device but the USB device itself. I have also had several devices that would not allow my laptop to boot when plugged in... I bought a better quality HD enclosure and it works just fine. I got an Adaptec ACS-120 2.5 inch enclosure which I boot linux from, no external power source needed.

pcgeek11
 
BIOS boot order can't be an issue here, as he is getting to the point of Windows trying to load. Even if the BIOS tried to boot off a USB device, it would just skip over it once it found there was no bootable partition on it (or possibly hang or dump an error like No Operating System Found).
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
BIOS boot order can't be an issue here, as he is getting to the point of Windows trying to load. Even if the BIOS tried to boot off a USB device, it would just skip over it once it found there was no bootable partition on it (or possibly hang or dump an error like No Operating System Found).
Click to expand...

Its not that simple, what if the BIOS is changing the drive mapping when it detects a live HDD on the USB, because it is ordered in the boot sequence to try to boot from USB first, in that case once the BIOS doesn?t see a boot loader in the first Drive (C:) it goes to the second boot device in the boot sequence i.e. primary SATA/IDE (D:), but by then the boot.ini doesn?t order the NTloader to the right device:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) instead of
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1).
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
BIOS boot order can't be an issue here, as he is getting to the point of Windows trying to load. Even if the BIOS tried to boot off a USB device, it would just skip over it once it found there was no bootable partition on it (or possibly hang or dump an error like No Operating System Found).
Click to expand...

There the is a couple of things you can do. After checking BIOS boot order, you can check your MOBO manufacture to see if there is a bios updated for it or you can just unplug the devices before you boot up. Try unplugging one at a time to see which device in making not boot up. I bet is the USB CF reader that is causing it. This was happening to one of friends and it was the USB card reader he had plug in.
 
Not having the HDD enclosure on, and the CF card removed, works. I was just hoping there were something that could be done to make it automatically use the 'real' HDD,
 
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