Elite 8300 won't boot with USB drive connected

[whiskerp]

Hi

I think that if you are using non-UEFI (ie Legacy) boot, even if you deselect booting from the USB drive and Removal Media boot, if you have a USB drive of more than 2.2TB present, it breaks it.

As for your other issue, I have seen this or something like it before but only once. It gave a "no bootable disk" or similar error.

Now that I have made sure that my SATA drives are UEFI boot, and disabled Legacy boot, it seems to work fine with two 3TB USB (externally powered) drives plugged in. It is NOT hapy with Legacy boot in these conditions.

Peter

[Shanksworthy]

Thanks @whiskerp. I was literally minutes away from exchanging my 4Tb Seagate for a 2Tb USB-powerd one, so you may have saved me the trouble.

So I've got Windows 7 booting from the internal SATA drive, using whatever defaul configuration the machine came with.  Probably safe to assume it's legacy.

What are the steps for this conversion? Do I have to reformat the SATA drive in some way? What changes (if any) do I need to make in the BIOS? (Sorry for my ignorance -- I'm not familiar with a lot of terminology you used).

[whiskerp]

Hi

There are instructions here for a clean install http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/186875-uefi-unified-extensible-firmware-interface-install-windo... .

I converted a Debian Linux system and it was a bit scary at times and required the use of Boot-Repair-Disk once or twice. My system disk was a md RAID mirror which both helped and hindered (the second drive had a Legacy boot capability).

This tutorial is probably what you want

http://superuser.com/questions/389971/how-to-move-an-existing-installation-of-window-7-64bit-to-uefi...

but I have not tried it myself.

Peter

[Shanksworthy]

Thanks! Had a quick look at the second option (existing Win7 install). Wow, long process! 🙂 Seems like a lot could go wrong -- I'll have to give this one some serious consideration.

BTW just to clarify, my 128Gb internal SATA drive *only* has a legacy option in the BIOS (whereas the external hard drive had both UEFI and legacy). Will my SATA drive appear in the UEFI section after following those steps? 

[whiskerp]

Hi

Yes, once the drive has a GPT partition structure and EFI partition it will probably appear in the list. I would advise you to take a good backup and if you have another disk drive of similar size, I guess a sector-by-sector image backup would be a useful thing to have! A "dd" backup of the entire disk to a .img file on your big USB drive would provide a way back to exactly where you are now if you did end up in a real mess. Download one of the Linux rescue disks and create a bootable USB stick (you can make an ISO image bootable by using Rufus from akeo.ie or similar software). This will allow you to easily make image backups and restore them to get your SATA drive back to how it is now.

Peter

[atopman]

Hi, i bought a seagate desktop plus 4tb as a ackup drive, and connected it whilst my HP8300 desktop was running It saw it ok as drive D:\ , and i set up a backup plan to execute in a couple of hours. I decided ( luckily) to test the PC reboot. Unfrtunately i had the same problem as the others above. No matter what bios setting i choose the PC will not boot with the external 4tb drive connected. Luckily for me the samsung evo840 SSD inside my HP8300 is my only sata drive , and was not damaged, as my PC still boots ok ( with seagate disconnected) . I tried the seagate plugged into my my laptop which still boots fine, no problem...

I have deleted the volume on the seagate and have reformatted it using acronis tools as GPT single volume, still works fine on laptop.

I will try it on the HP in a few days, does anyone have any tips on this..

the samasung evo ssd is seen as a legacy sata0 ,  the HP8300 was also being seen as usb legacy, so i hope the formatting as gpt will help to see it as the new style i think it was called UEFI, so maybe this will work

[awesomenokes]

I'm bumpung this thread.

Has anyone found a fix for this yet? I have an HP Compaq Elite 8100 Small Form Factor PC and I have a similar issue.

If I have any sort of USB storage plugged in while booting, I just get a blank screen with a blinking cursor.

I have disabled every boot device apart from the internal SATA hard drive and it still happens.

[robinraju]

These units might have issues booting up if a USB device of capacity 3TB or more is connected to it. There is a BIOS update needed to fix it. Check the Drivers page to see if you have the latest BIOS installed on the unit. If  you have the latest BIOS installed, call up tech support at 8666251175 and create a case and the engineering team at HP can create a BIOS for you that will allow boot when the device is connected.

[emilf]

I can confirm that updating BIOS fixes the problem. I had that excact problem. Updating to v02.99 Rev.A
from 19 Oct 2015 fixed the issue.

[HPAlf]

Hi!
In my case with HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF does not help newest firmware (currently 03.04 Rev.A) neither converting MBR to UEFI. As soon large USB drive is attached … computer freezes at boot. Constantly. USB drive does work wo any problems while OS is started.
Any further ideas perhaps?
More thanks, Alar.