Windows 8 boot blocked by USB Flash Drive

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JohnHind
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2012 11:33 am

Windows 8 boot blocked by USB Flash Drive

Post by JohnHind »

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!
TeraByte Support
Posts: 3598
Joined: Thu May 05, 2011 10:37 pm

Re: Windows 8 boot blocked by USB Flash Drive

Post by TeraByte Support »

I have a feeling there will be lots of "weird" issues with W8 because I
don't think it was well tested on hardware, most were probably using VM's.

"JohnHind" wrote in message news:3681@public.bootitbm...

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!

DrTeeth
Posts: 1289
Joined: Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:58 pm

Re: Windows 8 boot blocked by USB Flash Drive

Post by DrTeeth »

On Fri, 2 Nov 2012 12:10:15 PDT, just as I was about to take a herb,
"TeraByte Support" disturbed my
reverie and wrote:

>I have a feeling there will be lots of "weird" issues with W8 because I
>don't think it was well tested on hardware, most were probably using VM's.

I had an immediate issue after install in which windows updates would
fail to be applied and had an inability to changed the desktop
wallpaper. I use a handy utility to bring back the start menu from
Stardock.
--

Cheers

DrT
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