Dell Dimension 3000 attempting to boot to external USB hard drive that is not bootable

You should take another look in system setup; the USB ports have settings for on, off, and no-boot.

EDIT:  I believe you should find the settings for the USB ports in the Onboard Devices section.

JackShack,

  Sorry it took so long to post again. Today was the first chance I had to try your suggestion on the computer. I tried your suggestion and found the No Boot for the USB settings in the BIOS and the computer is still booting to the F: drive when it is plugged and the computer is turned on. Any other suggestions.

Jayme

You might want to go back and check to see if you remembered to save the setting.  I used a Dimension 2400 for several years that has the same feature and the only times it didn't work was if I managed to exit the system setup page without saving the changes.

If you still have the problem after making sure to save the changes when you exit BIOS setup, it's possible the motherboard battery is dead, so BIOS is reverting to its default settings and the changes aren't being stored.

Ron

Jack,

 I'm pretty sure that I high lighted the setting for save changes and exit, but I'll double check. After I check it again I'll also check the CMOS battery. I don't remember looking at the time on the computer when I've been working on it and that's usually the first sign that the battery is going dead. Thanks Ron for that suggestion.

Jayme

Okay, here's the latest. I check the setup and it is set to USB emulation No Boot. I didn't check the CMOS battery since the setting seemed to be correct and the owner of the computer told me that they have no problems with the time on the computer. They're still getting an attempted boot from the external drive if it's attached at boot up. The screen that comes up it blue with white letters, but I don't think it's a BSOD, because there's nothing about an error on it. It reads"

"Checking file system on F:

 The type of the file system is FAT32.

 The volume is dirty.

 Volume Serial Number is F114-D4AE

 Windows is verifying files and folders...

 \FOUND.000  first allocation unit is not valid.  The entry will be truncated

 Bad clusters removed from folder.

 12 percent completed......"

The 12 percent was where the scan was at when I took a picture of the screen. It appears that windows is trying to scan the drive for bootable files.

Jayme

No, the machine has already booted.  You can't get errors from the operating system executables before the computer is up and running.  What you're seeing is a chkdsk report.  I can't tell you what triggered it (the chkdsk execution, that is).

If you were waiting on a boot from the drive you would see only a black screen with a flashing cursor at the upper left of the screen.

Morning JackShack,

  I'm not sure why is doing the check disc either. It's a Western Digital portable hard drive that is being used on a desk top computer. It's also formated FAT32 instead of NTFS like the desk top, but I don't think either of those should cause the issue. I'm going to try booting with a flash drive plugged into the USB port and see if it tries to run the check disc on it. If it doesn't I'll assume that it has something to do with the portable hard drive and I'll contact WD. Thank you for your help and information.

Jayme

You're very welcome.  I'm happy I could help.

Aahaa, The volume is dirty

The "dirty" bit is a bit in the boot sector (for FAT or FAT32 volumes), or in the MFT (for NTFS volumes), that is checked when Windows starts. This bit is checked to determine whether corruption has been detected in the file system. If the dirty bit is set on a volume, Autochk runs to correct any errors on the volume.

In other words, you have a file system error on the external drive. It's going to keep doing what it's doing until that's fixed. It's not trying to boot from the USB drive, it's trying to fix the file system problem. And it's complicated because it's FAT32 and not NTFS.

Try this:

Boot without the USB drive connected. Then connect it when you're at the desktop

Click Start>run

Type in chkdsk F: / f

Click OK

Hopefully it will be able to fix the errors and clean the dirty bit. It's also possilble the USB drive is failing so you probably want to back up whatever's on that drive onto CDs or DVDs asap, just to be safe. :emotion-5:

And if chkdsk doesn't fix it, you might need to reformat it, but then use with caution because it still might die -unexpectedly. :emotion-9:

Ron

Good Morning Ron,

  Thank you for the "dirty" joke. I needed that. It was strange I was working on my VCE pretests yesterday and one of the questions dealt specifically with dirty hard drives. So I got online and found out what they were. I then spoke with the end user and he admitted that he was just unplugging the USB drive without using the Safely Remove Hardware icon. He has since tried booting the computer with the drive attached and the first time it booted up normally and the second time it went to the scan screen. He let it run the scan and it's still booting to the scan screen. The next time I'm up that way I'll try the chkdsk F: /f that you suggested. if it doesn't work I may have my work cut out to get him to do a reformat on the drive. Oh well if he doesn't do it and looses his information he can't blame it on me. :emotion-1:  Thanks for the help.

Jayme

In XP you can set Policies for the USB hard drive to "Optimize for Quick Removal". That way the user doesn't have to use the Safely Remove icon before unplugging the USB drive. I presume you can also do this in later versions of Windows.  Same thing can be done for USB memory sticks.

There'll be a very slight decrease in performance of the external drive, but the user will probably never notice but they will appreciate being able to yank the USB cable out whenever they want - as long as the PC isn't actively writing/reading to/from the USB drive.

You will get blamed - no matter what happens!   :emotion-17:

Ron

Ron,

 Thank you for the suggestion. I was checking into it and saw in another post on a different forum that "Optimize for Quick Removal" doesn't apply to USB drives. I'll do some more checking and if it looks like it will work, I'll try it the next time I'm able to.

Jayme

Ron,

 Thank you for putting me straight. I'll check it out when I have time. This same PC has developed another worse issue. I'm going to post it now. :-)

Jayme