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I am troubleshooting an issue for a customer that goes with a little bit of a back story before I came onto the scene.
Before I was called to assist this particular customer he purchased a Dell XPS Blackbird gaming tower with Windows Vista 64 Bit Ultimate installed on the primary hard drive and a second hard drive for extra space. After getting his computer and playing with it for several months he found out that Windows Vista would not boot if his external USB hard drive was powered on during the Vista boot up process. He would receive the blue and black faded background before the Windows Vista logo normally appears and the screen would stay on that for as long as he would let it. If he powered down the external USB drive and restarted. Vista would boot up completely with no issues or errors. From that point he could power back up the external drive and Vista would recognise and assign it a drive letter. He let this issue slide since he knew what was causing the conflict and any time he ran into the situation he would then remember to power down the external drive and reboot.
Just recently this customer called me and requested that I install 2 new 1TB drives as drives 3 and 4 and install Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on one of them as a dual-boot. After completing the requested task we determined that 7 boot up perfectly recognizing all 4 drives and the external with no troubles. I duplicated his data on both the Vista and 7 drives so that he could access each from the home directories and all was working well. After finishing with Windows 7 we decided to test out the Vista partition to make sure all was still ok with it, however after selecting the Vista boot option on the PC startup, we received the same issue as what was experienced with the External USB hard drive.
The Vista bootup goes as normal until the point you receive the stylized blue and black wavy background that fades to black on all four sides. At this point he screen stop and does not load any further. You can move around the mouse but Ctrl+Alt+Del does not load anything and no there is no further loading of windows. From this point I tried simply removing the HD containing the Windows 7 install, however the Windows Vista boot still did not continue. The only way I was able to get the Windows Vista bootup to complete was to remove both of the new hard drives and of course make sure he External USB drive is also powered off.
Needless to say this issue has me a little consufed since the new drives work fine in Windows 7 and the external works fine once Vista is finished booting and you power it on after that.
The one thing that I would like to note is that when you boot into Windows 7 the drive containing the 7 OS shows as Drive C even though it is the third drive out of a possible 5 this PC will support. When checking in Bios the Vista Drive is in SATA0 and the 7 Drive is in SATA2 where the original spare drive is in SATA1 and the new 1TB extra drive is in SATA3.
Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated on this and I can't shake the feeling I am missing something very obvious however I need another set of eyes or another brain to point it out to me....
Thanks for your help in advance.
Before I was called to assist this particular customer he purchased a Dell XPS Blackbird gaming tower with Windows Vista 64 Bit Ultimate installed on the primary hard drive and a second hard drive for extra space. After getting his computer and playing with it for several months he found out that Windows Vista would not boot if his external USB hard drive was powered on during the Vista boot up process. He would receive the blue and black faded background before the Windows Vista logo normally appears and the screen would stay on that for as long as he would let it. If he powered down the external USB drive and restarted. Vista would boot up completely with no issues or errors. From that point he could power back up the external drive and Vista would recognise and assign it a drive letter. He let this issue slide since he knew what was causing the conflict and any time he ran into the situation he would then remember to power down the external drive and reboot.
Just recently this customer called me and requested that I install 2 new 1TB drives as drives 3 and 4 and install Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit on one of them as a dual-boot. After completing the requested task we determined that 7 boot up perfectly recognizing all 4 drives and the external with no troubles. I duplicated his data on both the Vista and 7 drives so that he could access each from the home directories and all was working well. After finishing with Windows 7 we decided to test out the Vista partition to make sure all was still ok with it, however after selecting the Vista boot option on the PC startup, we received the same issue as what was experienced with the External USB hard drive.
The Vista bootup goes as normal until the point you receive the stylized blue and black wavy background that fades to black on all four sides. At this point he screen stop and does not load any further. You can move around the mouse but Ctrl+Alt+Del does not load anything and no there is no further loading of windows. From this point I tried simply removing the HD containing the Windows 7 install, however the Windows Vista boot still did not continue. The only way I was able to get the Windows Vista bootup to complete was to remove both of the new hard drives and of course make sure he External USB drive is also powered off.
Needless to say this issue has me a little consufed since the new drives work fine in Windows 7 and the external works fine once Vista is finished booting and you power it on after that.
The one thing that I would like to note is that when you boot into Windows 7 the drive containing the 7 OS shows as Drive C even though it is the third drive out of a possible 5 this PC will support. When checking in Bios the Vista Drive is in SATA0 and the 7 Drive is in SATA2 where the original spare drive is in SATA1 and the new 1TB extra drive is in SATA3.
Any hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated on this and I can't shake the feeling I am missing something very obvious however I need another set of eyes or another brain to point it out to me....
Thanks for your help in advance.
