Windows 8 boot blocked by USB Flash Drive
Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2012 1:28 pm
After loading Windows 8 from a fresh install using a boot DVD I found it would sometimes fail to boot after a restart. Immediately after Boot It Bare Metal screen, the screen would go blank and stay that way. After a lot of head banging and cursing of Microsoft and all its works, as well as restarting from scratch several times, I tried stripping the machine back to a minimum and then restoring items until it stopped booting again. To make a long story short (ish) I discovered the problem was a USB flash drive. I could actually unblock the boot just by removing this *after* BiBM without having to restart!
I tried reformatting the USB stick in Windows (FAT32, leaving it blank), but it still blocked the boot. I then tried reformatting it in BiBM and this cured the problem. Even after copying the files back onto the stick, Windows 8 now boots with it present. I tried another USB stick which displayed exactly the same symptoms. I thought maybe the USB drive was somehow pre-empting the boot sequence and it was trying to boot from that rather than the correct boot SSD, but in BiBM the SSD shows up as Drive 0 and the USB drive appears after all the SATA drives. Neither of these USB Drives presented any problems in Windows 7, but I should point out that I upgraded BiBM and the boot SSD at the same time as Windows, so I cannot be sure which caused the problem (or even if I might have set things up a bit different).
I post this mainly to help others, but if anyone has any kind of explanation for this weirdness I'd like to hear it!
I tried reformatting the USB stick in Windows (FAT32, leaving it blank), but it still blocked the boot. I then tried reformatting it in BiBM and this cured the problem. Even after copying the files back onto the stick, Windows 8 now boots with it present. I tried another USB stick which displayed exactly the same symptoms. I thought maybe the USB drive was somehow pre-empting the boot sequence and it was trying to boot from that rather than the correct boot SSD, but in BiBM the SSD shows up as Drive 0 and the USB drive appears after all the SATA drives. Neither of these USB Drives presented any problems in Windows 7, but I should point out that I upgraded BiBM and the boot SSD at the same time as Windows, so I cannot be sure which caused the problem (or even if I might have set things up a bit different).
I post this mainly to help others, but if anyone has any kind of explanation for this weirdness I'd like to hear it!