Strange Behaviour w/ External HD

[rbuckwalter]

Just built a new system, I had hard drive failure and decided it was time. System seems to work OK, but there are some quirks that I would love to figure out.

First - my external WD 750GB drive seems to freez the system when I attach via USB. It works fine when attached to my Laptop. The new system will not boot with this drive attached either, it hangs during system load. The bios is set not to boot from a usb device. Does this board/EX58 chipset have a flakey IDE controller, or is it not able to deal with FAT32 disk format? I had two IDE optical drives that worked OK. I have replaced one of those with a sata optical to free up a spot on the IDE controller for another HD, maybe that's a waste of time if the IDE is not good? Since I can not connect this drive directly I am moving 300GB of music and photos to the new machine via WiFi and that is Slooooow.

The limitation of these chipsets always seems to haunt me. My old Gigabyte board was great except that the chipset did not support memory card readers. With digital photography that turns out to be a PITA

Running Windows XP Professional 32bit
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Triple Channel
2 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD5 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard 1 Galaxy 95TFE8HUFEXX GeForce 9500 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video
OCZ Fatal1ty OCZ700FTY 700W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply