Re: Losing connection with USB drives

On 16/08/2025 18:36, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:24:40 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver"
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> I have had PCs that wouldn't boot if a USB memory stick was plugged in.
>> I can't remember whether it was any memory stick in any port, or just
>> certain sticks, or certain ports. It would have been, I'm pretty sure,
>> either Windows 7 or XP (USB under Windows 9x was pretty flaky anyway). I
>> haven't had that problem with this W10-64 machine, but possibly only
>> because I've never tried booting it with a stick plugged in so far.
> 
> I have sometimes had the problem if it not booting in those
> circumstances. But not always. It only happened about 1 in 10 times.
> 
> The USB had drive has its own power supply, and it now sees neither
> that nor any flash drives, nor the printer.
> 
> It still sees the mouse and the keyboard (otherwise I wouldn't be
> able to type this).

I usually put my desktop PC to sleep each night rather than shutting it 
down because takes -king ages to start up again (or at least to get 
background applications like Dropbox and Signal (Skype replacement) 
running).

I've noticed that if a certain USB drive (bus-powered) is plugged in 
when I press the power button to bring the PC out of sleep, it fails to 
produce an image on the screen and it begins its "go to sleep" procedure 
- high disk usage as it dumps the memory contents back to disk again. 
Once it has finished this process and the disk light goes out, I can try 
again, without the drive plugged in, and it always works.

The odd thing is that I've only noticed this symptom recently.


If a USB drive (HDD, memory stick or CD/DVD) is plugged in, there is 
always the chance that the PC may try to boot off it in preference to 
the HDD, depending on the boot sequence that is defined in the BIOS or 
EUFI. Been there, done that. A PC that booted perfectly well failed to 
boot (and hung with an on-screen message) if a USB drive of any 
description was plugged in, because it tried and failed to find a boot 
sector, whereas if there was no drive plugged in it wouldn't even look 
for one.