Computer will not boot with external hard drive connected

[john262]

Hi,

I set up a frugal install of Puppy 5.2 on it's own dedicated partition then installed Grub4DOS to make a dual boot system. My other OS is Windows 7 Pro. The Grub files were installed to the root of my C drive.

It works great except for one problem. When I have my Seagate external USB hard drive turned on it will not long boot into Windows. It will boot into Puppy in that situation but not Windows.

I select Windows on the Grub menu at boot up time, then I get the following screen:

Booting Windows Pro
(hd 0 0)
will boot NTLDR from drive = 0x80 partition = 0x0
(hidden sectors = 0x213cff7)

Then it just sits there and will not proceed with booting into Windows. But if I turn off the external drive while it is sitting there like that then immediately Windows boots normally.

I realize that I can just make sure that the drive is turned off before I boot into Windows but it still bugs me and makes me wonder what is causing that behavior.

BTW, it will boot when my Sandisk thumb drive is plugged in. It's just the external hard drive that prevents it from booting into Windows. I did not get this behavior before I installed Grub4DOS. I have the latest drivers for the external drive.

In my BIOS setup I have the boot order as follows: Hard Drive, CD Drive, Removable Drive. That was set up that way before I installed Grub4DOS and hasn't been changed since.

If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it. Thanks.

John

[Karl Godt]

Have no clue. Grub4dos is pretty good but having the files on toplevel and only capable of being installed to partition 1 left me defaulting to grub legacy .

Grub legacy can not work if it's stage_1.5 and stage_2 files are on a ntfs partition, but with 'chainloader +1' it boots windows fine.

Using Puppy full installs 99% .

I use the .sfs as an installation medium, not as an OS.

[john262]

Thanks for your reply. One of the other things I did was connecting the external drive to another computer that only has Windows installed on it and it booted up just fine.

[john262]

OK, I got out my Windows disk and reinstalled the Windows boot loader. That fixed it. Now I can boot while my external drive is turned on. So at least for the time being I will using my Puppy disk when I want to boot into Puppy. I also tested that and it works. I get the same desktop as before.