[SOLVED] Thumb drive prevents startup?

Hi-

My PC wouldn't get past the ASUS splash screen yesterday, and initially I thought the worst, since I couldn't even boot from a CD.  It just sat there; I couldn't get into the setup or do anything at all.

I went online with my laptop to Google this and came across a comment that someone with the same issue tried removing his thumb drive and that solved the problem.  Sure enough that did it for me, too, but I'd never heard of that before, and I'm pretty sure I've had a thumb drive attached at startup at one time or another.  It seems like a pretty major thing not to have noticed!

So my question is: Is this just the way it is with thumb drives, or only under certain circumstances I haven't come across before?  I've used this particular drive before and the only "unusual" thing about it is that it was temporarily used as a storage device for an Xbox.  The data was deleted while it was still attached to the Xbox, but I wonder if the way it formatted it originally has something to do with it.

The drive reads/writes fine in my PC, but my PC refuses to boot with it attached.  The file system is FAT32, if that makes a difference, my other drives are all NTFS.

It's not a big deal to remove it before I boot up, but I'm just curious why this happens.  I don't get a message of any kind, just the ASUS splash screen and then nothing.  It doesn't even try to read the hard drives or DVD.  Maybe there's a setting in the BIOS that's telling it to look for a USB drive to boot from, I'll check later.  But if that were the case I'd still expect a message.

Thanks-

-Susan

I don't have any answers for you, but I've had the same thing happen to me:
XP SP3 - NTFS - both internal system drives
Went to start up one morning with a 2GB (FAT) stick in and had the exact symptoms that you experienced.  Weird thing is I have booted this way numerous times with no problems ???  If anyone has an explanation, I'll be interested.
- B

I checked today, and my boot sequence is 1) CD, 2) HDD, 3) Disabled, so I'm still at a loss why it's checking the USB device.

Maybe cause when you have the usb stick in there at startup, the bios thinks its a hdd.  On my mobo the setting is called "usb storage function" and can be enabled or disabled. If enabled, the bios looks at all the usb drives and can boot from them. when disabled, the bios ignores the usb drives. But they're still available for windows to use.

On SOME PC's there is an option in the BIOS for "USB Boot" or "USB No Boot".  If yours has this option set it to "no boot" and see if it helps.  We used to see this on the Dell users forum when USB connected peripherals were attached.  During the BOOT, the BIOS would query the USB device for booting and because it was not a "boot device" it would not respond.  The BIOS would have to go through a "time out" cycle which can last a couple of minutes before continuing on.  People were seeing this as not being able to boot.

Well, I waited over 3 minutes and nothing happened. If it takes longer than that, I might as well just remove it in the first place!

-Susan

Update, I tried it both ways with a flash drive.  With it formatted to FAT32 (how it was originally formatted) my PC booted OK.  I then reformatted it to NTFS and rebooted and it was still OK, no delays.  I reformatted again back to the original FAT32 and did a third reboot and again no problems.

Update: Reformatting didn't make a difference, so I'll just live with it!

-Susan