I run an International Music Distribution service and have dozens of new laptops all running Windows 8.1  The media collection is over 3TB in size and I am having to use USB2 leads with USB3 Laptops and an external 4TB Drive as on powerup of the laptop, if the external drive is also powered up Windows attempts to BOOT from the non system external drive and for over 20 min nothing happens and I get a service call.   This fault does not respond to altering the boot sequence in BIOS and has been around since Windows 7 days.  

PROBLEM:  Windows attempts to boot from a non system external USB storage device and I get a service call saying Laptop is 'dead'.

It is NOT an out of date driver issue and effects all makes of laptop right across the board.   Any help would be great as I am now running out of old USB 2 external drive leads to give to my (mostly non technical) new clients.

Trying to explain to Bar staff not to switch on an external hard drive until after the Windows 8.1 boot sequence is not the answer sadly.

Kind regards,  Tom Waller for International Music Services (Malta)

Hi,

According to your description, this problem should occurs before Windows OS kernal  was loaded. Would please take a photo with this problem and post here?

On the other hand, is the computer using Legacy BIOS or UEFI? This problem is most probably caused by BIOS or motherboard edition problem. Please try to upgrade it to be latest for test.

Be warned.  Flashing BIOS is a risky process.  If power is interrupted during the update your machine will be rendered unusable.

Yes this occurs BEFORE the Windows OS Kernal is loaded so I can not capture a screen shot.   The laptops are all new and the problem started only under Windows 7 when the UEFI secure boot was introduced and has continued since.   All the laptops the group lease have up to date BIOS and we simply issue the instructions NOT to leave the external hard drives running at the end of a session and at the start of the next session, power up the laptop and wait until you see the Windows 8.1 hour glass before powering up the external USB3 4TB drive.

Bar tending is a low paid job and the staff turnover at some venue's can be high.  New bar staff never get taught properly how to start up the iMS Music systems and this is the problem.   Best thing is for you to replicate this problem on any modern laptop with a solid state drive - we remove the mechanical drives, after cloning the OS onto solid state drives for reliability and speed as well as cooler running of the laptops as most of our clients are in the southern Mediterranean where temperatures in summer can be a problem.

As this problem also exists on any type of boot drive, be it mechanical or SSD please connect an external USB3 drive to any modern make of USB3 Windows 8.1 OS Laptop and with that drive powered up, power up the laptop and observe, the larger the external USB3 drive, the longer the hang time before Windows 8.1 gets to boot up.

If I could take a screenshot it would show a blank screen or the BIOS or Maker flash screen, frozen for up to a half hour until booting to the desktop.  During this time the external 4TB drive (various makes and enclosures) indicate rapid data access and the drive busy LED's all flash quickly during this period.

Due to the speed of the SSD it is very difficult to gain access to the BIOS using the F2 Key or Delete (depending on laptop make) so I am unable to change the boot from UEFI to Legacy, but tests with the original mechanical drives before conversion proved that changing to legacy did not cure this problem.   Though I am retired now and helping out at International Music Services, I was in IT with BP shipping before then.   I can not post photo's as I get an error message about verification of this account sigh...

Thank you for your time and help with this problem.  NOTE the 4TB drives only have 600GB free space and after the timeout the laptop does reach the desktop as normal.

• Edited by Thomas Roy Waller 54 minutes ago

Yes this occurs BEFORE the Windows OS Kernal is loaded so I can not capture a screen shot.   The laptops are all new and the problem started only under Windows 7 when the UEFI secure boot was introduced and has continued since.   All the laptops the group lease have up to date BIOS and we simply issue the instructions NOT to leave the external hard drives running at the end of a session and at the start of the next session, power up the laptop and wait until you see the Windows 8.1 hour glass before powering up the external USB3 4TB drive.

Bar tending is a low paid job and the staff turnover at some venue's can be high.  New bar staff never get taught properly how to start up the iMS Music systems and this is the problem.   Best thing is for you to replicate this problem on any modern laptop with a solid state drive - we remove the mechanical drives, after cloning the OS onto solid state drives for reliability and speed as well as cooler running of the laptops as most of our clients are in the southern Mediterranean where temperatures in summer can be a problem.

As this problem also exists on any type of boot drive, be it mechanical or SSD please connect an external USB3 drive to any modern make of USB3 Windows 8.1 OS Laptop and with that drive powered up, power up the laptop and observe, the larger the external USB3 drive, the longer the hang time before Windows 8.1 gets to boot up.

If I could take a screenshot it would show a blank screen or the BIOS or Maker flash screen, frozen for up to a half hour until booting to the desktop.  During this time the external 4TB drive (various makes and enclosures) indicate rapid data access and the drive busy LED's all flash quickly during this period.

Due to the speed of the SSD it is very difficult to gain access to the BIOS using the F2 Key or Delete (depending on laptop make) so I am unable to change the boot from UEFI to Legacy, but tests with the original mechanical drives before conversion proved that changing to legacy did not cure this problem.   Though I am retired now and helping out at International Music Services, I was in IT with BP shipping before then.   I can not post photo's as I get an error message about verification of this account sigh...

Thank you for your time and help with this problem.  NOTE the 4TB drives only have 600GB free space and after the timeout the laptop does reach the desktop as normal.

• Edited by Thomas Roy Waller Wednesday, May 20, 2015 6:27 AM

Yes this occurs BEFORE the Windows OS Kernal is loaded so I can not capture a screen shot.   The laptops are all new and the problem started only under Windows 7 when the UEFI secure boot was introduced and has continued since.   All the laptops the group lease have up to date BIOS and we simply issue the instructions NOT to leave the external hard drives running at the end of a session and at the start of the next session, power up the laptop and wait until you see the Windows 8.1 hour glass before powering up the external USB3 4TB drive.

Bar tending is a low paid job and the staff turnover at some venue's can be high.  New bar staff never get taught properly how to start up the iMS Music systems and this is the problem.   Best thing is for you to replicate this problem on any modern laptop with a solid state drive - we remove the mechanical drives, after cloning the OS onto solid state drives for reliability and speed as well as cooler running of the laptops as most of our clients are in the southern Mediterranean where temperatures in summer can be a problem.

As this problem also exists on any type of boot drive, be it mechanical or SSD please connect an external USB3 drive to any modern make of USB3 Windows 8.1 OS Laptop and with that drive powered up, power up the laptop and observe, the larger the external USB3 drive, the longer the hang time before Windows 8.1 gets to boot up.

If I could take a screenshot it would show a blank screen or the BIOS or Maker flash screen, frozen for up to a half hour until booting to the desktop.  During this time the external 4TB drive (various makes and enclosures) indicate rapid data access and the drive busy LED's all flash quickly during this period.

Due to the speed of the SSD it is very difficult to gain access to the BIOS using the F2 Key or Delete (depending on laptop make) so I am unable to change the boot from UEFI to Legacy, but tests with the original mechanical drives before conversion proved that changing to legacy did not cure this problem.   Though I am retired now and helping out at International Music Services, I was in IT with BP shipping before then.   I can not post photo's as I get an error message about verification of this account sigh...

Thank you for your time and help with this problem.  NOTE the 4TB drives only have 600GB free space and after the timeout the laptop does reach the desktop as normal.

• Edited by Thomas Roy Waller Wednesday, May 20, 2015 6:27 AM

Hi,

You mean this problem only occurs on Windows 7 which would be failed to startup if 4TB external drive connected with USB. But Windows 8.1 would keeps long time to boot up successfully, isn't it?

In my opinion, this problem was caused by system mounting large capacity during startup.

You can try to delay Plug and Play service start for test:

Open Run, Type services.msc, Press Enter.

Then find Plug and Play, set its Startup type to automatic (Delayed Start)

No the problem was exactly the same on both Windows 7 and Windows 8 then Windows 8.1 in that the external drive (when left powered up on laptop switch on) would be flashing data access for a long time before those operating systems would boot up, as long as 20 min.

I have migrated my whole group over to Windows 8.1.   When I attempt to set the plug and play service to automatic (delayed start) I get the error message Error 87 The parameter could not be set, so I set Plug and Play to disabled and the fault remained on boot up, so I put the Plug and Play service back to the original setting of Manual.

If I use a USB2 lead on the USB3 drive this problem goes away if that is a help.

Hi,

For modify the service startup type problem, it seems like design by default. Please try to set its start up type as Manual for test.

Firstly, try to disable the service and restart the PC to check if the problem persists.

unable to change the boot from UEFI to Legacy

Try doing that via  shutdown.exe  -r -o  (or hold Shift while using the Restart option in a Shutdown menu.)  Supposedly you can get to restart and change UEFI Firmware Settings that way.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/20256-uefi-firmware-settings-boot-inside-windows-8-a.html

 

HTH

I have already tried disabling Plug and Play and the fault remained.   Clearly this is a design flaw with either USB3 or Windows and is unresolved meaning that ANY large 4TB USB3 external drive which is fully populated with data will prevent Windows 7 or 8 from booting up if this drive is powered up and plugged in on system power up.

I would be pleased if you could bring this problem to the attention of the powers that be so it may be resolved under Windows 10 as I wish to offer as few problems to my mostly non technical user base as possible and replacing all the external drive USB3 Cables with USB2 ones is clearly not the best of solutions.

Thank you for your time in this matter.    Tom Waller for International Music Services (Malta)

Thanks for that Robert,  I did get to the BIOS but changing to Legacy Boot did not cure the problem, the OS still waits for the external 4TB drive to prove it is not a system disk regardless of Legacy or Boot up order changes in BIOS.   I have the Boot from USB Drive set to the lowest priority, but no chance in the long wait.

The clue is a USB 2 drive cable cures this problem so this seems to indicate a USB3 hardware problem which has never been addressed since its launch.

With smaller external USB3 storage devices the problem is still there but the drive is scanned so quickly that you do not really see any impact in start up time, but put a fully populated 4TB external drive connected with its USB3 cable and power it up before switching on the Laptop or base station and you will then clearly see the problem.

All the groups Laptops are fitted with SSD boot disks so boot up is normally very very quick.

I can get my Gigabyte based motherboard Base station to do the exact same thing on power on if I leave an external USB3 4TB drive connected to it and powered on.

Are the data partitions on these external drives by any chance marked Active? That would provide the indication to the firmware during boot that the disk contained a bootable operating system. You could use diskpart to make the partition inactive.

Is the disk formatted FAT32 (which is required for boot on UEFI)? Perhaps an NTFS formatted disk would not be subject to the boot sequence.

Since the selection of boot device occurs within the computers firmware, and outside the operating system, Windows itself isnt involved. You would be better off contacting the system manufacturer and requesting support regarding why the system is booting to USB (3.0) devices even when the firmware is configured to boot directly from the native boot volume.

Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro
Windows for IT Pros on TechNet

Yes there is a single partition marked ACTIVE.   The Data (Music Library Drives) are all NFTS as they are 4TB or larger in size.   I am worried if I mark the partition as inactive will I loose date, as even at USB3 speeds it is a 7 hour task to re populate each drive with the Licensed for playback in Public HD Video and Karaoke collection.

I will give it a go though and see what happens.   Thank you for your time.