Boot hangs with USB external drive

[Guest]

Vista boot hangs at the 'loading' screen with USB or IEEE 1394 external drive
attached. If the drive is powered off, the boot proceeds normally. BIOS has
boot from USB turned off. System is an Intel 975XBX2 with Intel Core 2 CPU.
The external drive is a WD2500JS. Device Manager just lists is a 'Disk
Drive'. Has anyone else experienced boot problems with external drives
attached?

 

[Richard Urban]

In the bios, choose to not use/recognize legacy USB devices. Works here.

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Regards,

Richard Urban MVP
Microsoft Windows Shell/User

 

[Adam Albright]

Vista boot hangs at the 'loading' screen with USB or IEEE 1394 external drive
attached. If the drive is powered off, the boot proceeds normally. BIOS has
boot from USB turned off. System is an Intel 975XBX2 with Intel Core 2 CPU.
The external drive is a WD2500JS. Device Manager just lists is a 'Disk
Drive'. Has anyone else experienced boot problems with external drives
attached?

You sure your BIOS is set to have boot order to boot off your primary
hard drive? While you can, you shouldn't turn on any external drive
until AFTER you boot successfully into Windows, and only then after it
settles down if it normally does things like run anti-virus or other
TSR things or some app phone home to update a database or something.
Windows never did like to be "bothered" when it is polling hardware,
if it is obviously busy, wait that minute or two.