External Hard Drive (Needs Rebooting)

[abbbe]

Hi guys ;-)

I hope someone can help me I've been looking all over the net and haven't found any solutions :-(


I have a Maxtor basics 1.5TB external hard drive that's running fine on my vista home premium computer but as soon as I reboot or boot the computer vista says "you need to format the disk in drive". If I unplug the hard drive from the mains and plug it back in everything goes back to working perfectly.

My question is can I make vista detect it correctly in the first place without me having to reboot the hard drive?



P.S

One more thing, when vista is telling me that it needs to be formatted , if I go in to disk management it says that the drive is only 30 something gb and that its a RAW disk.


Thanks for any help given ;-)

 

[Mustangsupra]

I am not 100% sure that I understand exactly what your problem is. The way I am understanding it is that your computer is trying to boot from your external hard drive (if your external hard drive isnt formatted corectly that is something different). One of the ways to fix this is to change the boot order. When the computer first starts there will be a screen (typically showing the make, HP, Sony, Dell, etc.) that lists options, one of which will be something called settings or something to that effect (on my Asus board I use the Delete key to access the settings, but on others it may be F10, f12 or something else, it should tell though).

In the settings there should be a tab that says boot. In there you should be able to set priority to what you want it to be.

I dont know if this is the problem you are having or if it will even work, but I hope it helps.

Jeremy

 

[abbbe]

Thanks for the reply ;-)

But unfortunately that's not the problem I'm having.

The external usb hard drive is only used for storage.

The problem I'm having is that when I turn on my computer the external hard drive doesn't work properly until I unplug either the power cord or the usb plug and plug it back in.


I went into the bios yesterday and turned off "usb legacy support" and that seemed to fix he problem, the only problem with doing that is that I have a usb keyboard and mouse and they cant be use in certain situations with the usb legacy support turned off :-(

Is there any walk around for this?

thanks again ;-)

 

[abbbe]

Well guys turning off "usb legacy support" in the bios didn't fix the problem after all


The only way I've managed to fix the problem is by adding a usb 2.0 pci card to the computer and plugging the hard drive into that.


I'm am now faced with a new problem (not sure if I should make a new thread or not) :-(


What's happening now is when I boot the computer up with the hard drive plugged in, I get past the bios screen at the usual speed but it take a ages to bet past the "Microsoft Corporation" screen. the screen then goes black with just the curser doing its thing.


Does anyone know what I can do to sort this out?

Thanks for any advice given

 

[Mustangsupra]

Maybe it is trying to boot from the external hard drive now?

So it will start up fine without the hard drive connected? But will stick at black screen when it is?

Jeremy

 

[abbbe]

Maybe it is trying to boot from the external hard drive now?

So it will start up fine without the hard drive connected? But will stick at black screen when it is?

Jeremy

Thanks for the reply


That's exactly what's happening. :sa:


I've tried removing it from the bios but it makes no difference

 

[Mustangsupra]

In the bios you should change the boot order, if cd is first change it to your internal hdd. Some mobos will see an external hdd as a cd. This may or may not work, as I have only tried it in XP.

Hope this helps

Jeremy