EXT hard drive wierdness. Help
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  1. #1

    EXT hard drive wierdness. Help

    Ok my last system was a XP 32 bit and I had a ext hardrive used to keep purchased addons,backups,sceneries,you name it. Then after a system lock up, I started getting the dreaded NTLDR missing.
    Long story short, the computer was trying to "boot" off that ext drive. Going into bios showed the main HD missing and that ext hd was priority one. Its like the computer cannot find the actual main os hard drive so it instead uses the ext drive to try and boot off of.

    Jump to new system I have. Its a I7 Vista 64.
    Had a simular incident so I bought a new ext hardrive.
    Well guess what, its happened a few times in the last month.Totally new machine and os. My system lockup wile online. Reboot and got the NTLDT missing. Unplugged the ext HD and all is well. Even if I edit bios and remove that ext drive from boot priorities, when this does happen, my main hard drive is missing and the ext hd is shown as boot priority drive 1.
    My only solution I can find is to turn off the power to the ext drive when I am not using it.
    Any help appreciated as I am afraid eventually I will not be able to boot up at all and do yet another os reinstall. Thanks, Jim

    Note- This doesnt happen every boot. Only on occassion and never on first boot or after reawakening the system after being put on sleep. Seems like if I get a online page freeze,game lockup ect requiring a reboot or if I install a prog that reauires a reboot.
    In bios the main os HD will be missing. If I unplug or turn the power off to the ext drive, the system starts normally and in bios, the os hd is there.

  2. #2
    harleyman
    Guest
    Hey...


    Heres the deal...Its never advised to power off or on with an external drive connected....

    reason being..It borks the boot ini file sometimes....

    That can be repaired a number of ways, but you don't have that problem yet if you unhook the external....

    Is your bios up to date? Is your main HDD (C/) on a proper partition?

    When you boot with it connected, the bios reads the drive and assigns it .
    It appears that its just unhappy with that deal...

    I would leave it unplugged until its used to back up ...Thats what I do....



    It must be connected thru a USB 2.0 I assume, not a sata or E-Sata connection ?

  3. #3
    Yes I have the old ext drive and a new Seagate both usb. The Seagate doesnt even have a on/off switch so I assumed you just left it on and plugged up. 99.9% of the time I boot with no problems. It seems that if I crash,ctd,freeze then the os gets confused.
    I am not going to temp fate so I will just turn them on when I want to access them.

  4. #4
    harleyman
    Guest
    Its strange that it happens after a system crash...

    Maybe you fix the reason behind the crashes you are good to go..

    A crash like you describe is never good on software..it gets it all confused..

    Like I said..Possibably a bios flash may help with all that stuff happening...

    For sure something is not happy.be it hardware or software to be crashing like that

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