External USB Drive Delays Vista Startup

[jillsy]

Has anyone else noticed this on Vista machines?

I have two different PCs running Vista - a 4-year-old machine running Vista Home Premium and a 1-year-old machine running both XP Pro and Vista Ultimate. On both, they take a long time to load Vista when an external USB hard drive is connected. In fact, the older machine just hangs so long that you would think Vista just isn't going to load at all.

Once Vista loads, things seem fine. It's just annoying that it does this. The machine that has both XP and Vista loads XP fine with a USB drive attached, and both Vista machines load normally once the drive is disconnected.

I was just wondering if there's any solution to this problem. Both machines have all available updates, etc. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Jill

[Statica]

Unfortunately, it's a widely documented issue with Vista and USB drives. And it has been documented quite frequently .. however there seems to be no fix that I could find.

[EzyStvy]

I have an XP machine that won't boot at all with a flash drive plugged in. And it doesn't even have an option to boot off flash drives...

Some USB printers can cause a slow bootup too. The bios detects its hooked up and wants to handshake with it during bootup..

[jillsy]

Thanks for your replies. At least I'm not alone. I was surprised that I didn't see much about this specific problem when I did a general web search, but I probably just wasn't using the best search terms.

My system with XP and Vista also has a USB printer connected. I'm not sure now if I've tried to boot that system into Vista with just the printer and not the external drive connected, so I don't know if the printer affects it as well.

The machine with only Vista does boot up fine with a USB flash drive connected. It's just the external hard drive that seems to cause delays.

So I guess we just sit back and hope Microsoft comes out with a fix at some point.

Thanks,
Jill