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Strange boot hang
I have a i5150, which has given good service. Last summer I had a problem during the boot where the progress bar would stop at about 75%. Some detail: this would only happen when I had an external USB HDD attached and, seemingly, not all the time. Often I would have two external USB HDDs attached.
The cure was to remove one of the USB HDDs and reboot then replug the removed USB HDD.
After 16 emails with 12 different Dell Indian techs (in Bangalore??) and a call to tech service locally I was no further ahead except to an upgrade to A36 which did not help. Of course I ran the full diagnostic set - all OK. The most common cause advanced was that the internal HDD was defective. Often the techs could even understand the problem: they often thought I was trying to boot from the USB HDD. I was not convinced and unwilling to spend a week reinstalling and configuring to a new internal HDD. So, I let it slide and used the above "work around".
The strange thing was that it did not matter which of the USB drives was removed, so it couldn't be that the drive was defective. And once the 5150 was running XP there was no problem attaching the second drive. Then I acquired a third USB HDD and suddenly I could boot with two drives attached - but then the problem sometimes recurred.
I don't when the "solution" struck me: sometime late fall 2004. Of the 3 USB HDDs two were formatted NTFS and one was FAT32. Some experimentation gave proof.
1. A single USB HDD, NTFS or FAT32 = smooth boot
2. Two NTFS USB HDD drives = smooth boot
3. Mixed NTFS USB HDD & FAT32 USB HDD = boot HANG!
Ah hah. But why? I haven't the faintest idea. Some BIOS writing guru at Dell could probably enlighten us and maybe even fix the code. In the meantime I post this as a cautionary tale. Note: the problem only occurs during boot. Once XP is running it is perfectly happy to have mixed NTFS & FAT32 USB HDDs.
Standard i5150: 512MB, Win XP Pro except the internal HDD was upgraded to a 7k60 (7200 RPM/8MB buffer).
- OK, OK, I will upgrade to BIOS A38. I definitely agree that it is a BIOS issue. I note that I have booted with up to 3 USB storage devices including HHD drives, flash drives and combinations of these. The *ONLY* time the boot hangs is when there is a mixture of FAT and NTFS formatted USB storage devices attached. Removing the "odd man out", either FAT or NTFS, allows for a complete boot. Then, when XP is up and stable the drive can be reattached since XP is now in driving the echi USB controllers.
Question to Dell - can we look for a A39 BIOS revision to handle this?
Raicard
208 Posts
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Posted April 26th, 2005 01:00