How can I make a portable USB hard drive NOT boot

  • Thread starter Thread starter GJS
  • Start date Start date
G

GJS

I had to recover my system today and replaced the hard drive with a
new one. I then put my old hard drive (which was not booting
correctly) into a USB external drive enclosure... thus making it my
portable hard drive.

The problem I have now is any time I connect this drive via the USB 2
port to the computer, the system restarts and tries to boot off of
this drive. I am guessing that XP sees this drive as still bootable
and thus tries to do so.

What can I do to tell XP.. not to do this or to make the drive non
bootable.

Thanks,

George
 
i'm not sure but chack the jumper on the drive, make sure
its not on master!!! maybe even remove it!
 
Or make sure the bios on the machine doesn't say 'boot from removable
devices' or 'try other devices' before it says 'boot from HDD'. Some BIOS
have those options.
 
GJS wrote:

....
What can I do to tell XP.. not to do this or to make the drive non
bootable.
Click to expand...

Don't tell that XP, tell it your BIOS. Please check the boot sequence in
the BIOS setup. It looks as if the system tries to boot from USB-HDD
prior to IDE-HDD.
Thanks,
Click to expand...

HTH
Hans
 
Thanks for the replies but so far I don't have a solution.

My BIOS does not have an option to boot from USB-HDD or anything else
similar.

The sequence is Diskette, Hard Drive, CD Drive...

Isn't there some way to make the drive "Not bootable"?

George
 
Is the system is restarting when you plug the drive in while the computer is
running? If that's what you're saying, the problem is not whether the drive
is bootable or not, it shouldn't be causing the computer to reboot. You
should be able to plug in bootable drives without the computer spontaneously
restarting itself.
 
Yes.. it reboots when plugged in.

It did not do this when I had a external hard drive with no boot record..
only when I put one in that does have a boot record. Weird.

I will probably end up reformatting this drive and I assume this will
"correct" the problem.

George
 
I doubt it's because it has a boot record, otherwise you'd never be able to
have a dual-boot system or view a bootable cd or insert a bootable floppy.

And I regularly plug in bootable hard drives via USB into my test machine.

The fact that the computer is restarting would more likely indicate that
there's something seriously wrong with that drive that's causing the
computer to fail. My money would be a hardware fault, but I guess it could
also be some software glitch.

But it's not just because it has a boot record.
 
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