26 minute restart & boot time

[John8300]

I posted about this nearly ago. At the time I thought I had a solution but it didn't work out and I'm still struggling.

I have an HP Ryzen7 PC. If I restart, open task manager, and click the "Startup" tab it shows that the bios time is 1536.8 seconds (25.6 minutes). For the first 3-4 minutes of the boot process the display is blank, for the remaining time it shows the HP logo and "Protected by HP Sure Start".

Connected to the PC is a WD 12 TB external USB drive. The drive has 11 TB of Macrium backup files and about 2 TB of various other files.

This excessive reboot time is not unique to either this particular instance of the computer or this particular instance of the drive. I get similar extreme numbers on a second similar PC and drive. Replacing the motherboard (for an unrelated problem) on one of the PCs did not change the boot time.

This problem did not suddenly occur, it has existed with these two pc's ever since I installed the large hard drives.

If I boot without the USB drive the bios time drops to 20.1 seconds.

If instead of doing a restart I manually shut down the computer, the power light goes out in under 30 seconds. If I then turn the computer on it starts up (with the 12 TB drive connected) in less than 33 seconds.

Since the extreme boot delay occurs in the bios, that means it's not dependent on my apps or almost any other common cause of long boot delays.

I'm hoping someone has a solution, or even an explanation?

[WAWood]

You've diagnosed the issue yourself -- if you disconnect the large external drive, the PC boots quickly.

This is NOT unusual with modern PCs, as the BIOS will often attempt to boot from any external drive connected and, in many cases will keep doing that over and over and over, until it eventually gives up and then looks for an internal drive to boot from.

I have the same issue with an HP desktop and the ONLY solution I have found is to disconnect the external drive prior to booting and then reconnect it after booting has finished.