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HP Recommended
z620
Microsoft Windows 10 (64-bit)

I don't know what specific details here are relevant, but can provide additional details per suggestions.

 

I have an HP z620 with a boot block date of 3/6/2013. It came with a 500GB HDD and boots fine when that is the only drive installed/attached. When I attach an 8TB external drive, the computer hangs during the boot process (I _think_ after POST, certainly after lots of things flash past on the screen), eventually stopping with a cursor blinking in the top left corner of the screen. If the drive is attached after the Windows logo appears, the computer proceeds to boot successfully and the drive works just fine. I've limped along for about a year just temporarily disconnecting the external drive when rebooting.

 

This week I've attempted to install a 1TB internal SSD, with mixed success. When the computer was first booted with the uninitialized drive, everything appeared to work fine, with the computer successfully booting to Windows using the original HDD. Once in Windows I initialized the SSD with GPT and formatted it with NTFS. Now when I reboot the computer, it hangs exactly in the way it was when the external drive was connected. I don't know for sure that GPT is the issue, but the 500GB drive that works is using MBR, and of course the 8TB drive is using GPT.

 

I've tried adjusting some settings in the BIOS, in particular reverting to factory defaults, and toggling the Mass Storage Option ROM from Legacy to EFI. None of the changes I've made have allowed the computer to boot past the blinking cursor and into Windows. Since it's an internal drive, and because my goal is to make the SSD the boot drive to replace the HDD, I can't just leave it disconnected until the boot process gets further before plugging it in. And if GPT might be the issue, I'm in kind of a bind because I can't simply boot to the old drive and then reinitialize the SSD with MBR to see if it fixes the problem (presuming hot swap isn't an option).

 

I've tried to find solutions to this problem here and elsewhere with no luck. In fact before purchasing the SSD, I searched for information on whether it was possible to upgrade to an SSD, and it sounded like there shouldn't be an issue. Can anyone help?

2 REPLIES 2
HP Recommended

the bios boot procedure is to simply start at the first bootable device and then if not found proceed to the next to the list

 

if the system starts booting the OS quickly and then pauses, then you most likely have a software or driver issue most likely which is pausing the boot process till it times out check the windows boot logs for further information

HP Recommended

Have you tried adding in a boot delay (from the setting in BIOS), say 30 seconds or so?

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