Problem with external hd

Question

I have a del Inspiron laptop using 8.1 and have a wd my book 4tb hard drive plugged in the USB port and it will not boot as it fails during bios and I cannot enter bios using f2. The hard drive is exFAT with gpt partioning.

nyc10036 · Accepted Answer

@barnett1

Remove the external HD.

Boot laptop.

Plug external HD into USB port.

The Inspiron 14z 5423 shipped on February 25, 2013. The last non-Intel Security Advisor BIOS released by Dell was on January 4, 2018. Dell is not going to investigate this user caused 3rd party hardware issue.

Clintlgm · Answer

Windows 10 will not boot from a USB External drive. You have to boot from your Internal drive and use the 4TB as a backup drive as it is intended

barnett1 · Answer

Not trying to boot from the external drive as it is not a bootable drive. Using 8.1 not 10

barnett1 · Answer

So I am looking for why the bios code is failing not obvious solutions.

barnett1 · Answer

Wow. Talk about staying the obvious. Of course I can do that but that is not the issue. I want to now why it fails.

jphughan · Answer

@nyc10036  Some people might not want to have to disconnect their external hard drive every time they restart their PC -- especially if they access their PC remotely and might occasionally need to restart their PC and have it come back up for continued remote access, rather than getting stuck trying to boot and therefore require on-site attention before it can be used again.

jphughan · Answer

@barnett1  I've seen this on some systems in the past.  I'm not sure why, and on one system I owned myself that exhibited this issue, I was never able to find any settings I could change that would address the issue.  It was eventually fixed as part of a BIOS update.  So if you haven't already, make sure you're running the latest release.  Otherwise, there's a slim chance that using NTFS rather than exFAT would change something here if the system is trying to actually read that drive when it boots and supports exFAT (or thinks it does because it supports FAT and hangs because it doesn't really) while it might not bother with NTFS at all.  And actually unless you have a specific reason for using exFAT, such as needing to maintain read/write access on non-Windows OSes, you might want to consider NTFS anyway because it supports additional capabilities related to functionality, resiliency, and recoverability that might come in handy some day.  Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to perform an in-place conversion from exFAT to NTFS, so you'd have to back up the contents of the disk and reformat it as NTFS.

nyc10036 · Answer

@jphughan  It amazes me when people deliberately choose to make things difficult on themselves. Oh well. Not my problem.   .

barnett1 · Answer

Having problems posting a response

barnett1 · Answer

I agree with your comments. I do know of one case where reformatting to ntfs solved the problems.

jphughan · Answer

@nyc10036  not being satisfied with having to disconnect your external drive every time you want to restart your laptop isn't unreasonable, nor is coming here hoping that someone might have a suggestion for an actual FIX even if they begrudgingly deal with the workaround in the meantime.  That is not deliberately making something hard on yourself.  It's just wanting a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

nyc10036 · Answer

@jphughan  Honestly, whatever. If you get kicks from this, all the power to you.   .

Inspiron

Problem with external hd

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