XP(sp3) won't boot with external drives attached

[swethington]

Hopefully someone else has had this problem, I haven't been able to find any posts about it.

i have a 24" iMac, 2.33 Core2Duo runninng 10.5.4 and Windows xp (sp3) under boot camp. I also access the boot camp partition via Fusion, but haven't had any issues there so far.

My problem is that I have 2 external drives connected to my computer. One firewire 400, one usb2. If I have either (or both) of them connected to my computer when starting up in windows, windows won't start. It just hangs on the Windows XP screen (black background with progress bar at the bottom) until I reboot the machine with the drives unplugged. Both drives are formatted HFS+ and in Windows I have software that allows these drives to be accessed. (Not Macdrive, but something just like that). No matter what I've tried, Windows just won't start if an external drive is connected.

I've asked a handful of people who know Windows really well, and everyone is stumped.

Has anyone else had this problem? Or even if not, anyone have any ideas how to fix it? It's really a pain to keep having to unplug these drives every time I boot into Windows via boot camp.

thanks for any help!

 

[chscag]

Windows gets confused when a device is attached via USB or Firewire that it can not read. It won't boot because the read fails.

You might have software or a driver that can read HFS+ but remember - the software or driver only loads AFTER Windows boots.

Regards.

 

[swethington]

do you know if vista has this same issue? i don't know that its really that much of an issue that it would be worth spending so much for an upgrade from xp, but i'd be interested to know if vista was any better at handling a situation like this.

thanks for the input, i've pretty much accepted that this will just have to be an annoyance i live with. its really not that bad, but you know, it gets old having to unplug my drives all the time.

 

[Babyboi]

i don't really know a solution, but i had a very similar problem. It might have something to do with something called "target disk mode" or something, not quite sure myself. what i did was take my firewire external hard drive and used the usb connections to the mac instead of the firewire connection. after that it runs fine. I'd much rather use the firewire connection rather than the USB because i'll have an extra usb port. one time i let the xp splash screen hang for couple of hours, still nothing. so if someone out there with a real solution please let us know

 

[mrybarra]

XP sp3 is microsofts problem

I just upgraded my boot camp to xp sp3 and experienced the same problem. From what I gather on the internet, this is specifically a sp3 issue with external firewire drives. The Microsoft Tech Net forums has threads confirming this issue, but no real resolution except to unplug your firewire drive. I thought i saw they had success with using a usb external connection instead of firewire.

One thing that seems odd to me is that When I run xp sp3 via parallels with my firewire drive attached, windows xp sp3 starts up just fine. It is probaby because my parallels is not seeing the firewire drive.

 

[mrybarra]

Workaround found

I found a work around on the internet. It appears that the issue lies with the 1394 network adapter/controller. I found this solution on the internet. I went into my networks and viewed my network connections and disabled the 1394 network connection. I shut down and turned on my firewire drive and windows booted right up without any issues.