I have a problem with my WD My Book 500GB. The problem is that if I leave it connected and reboot my pc, the PC loops over and over and wont startup. It loops when the MB Post screen apppears, but never manages to actually get into the post options, the MB Splash appears over and over, this is as far as it gets. However If I unplug the WD the pc starts up as mormal. I have 2 internal drives C: drive 1000GB and D: drive 500GB amd the External WD, I wonder if theres a conflict somewhere along the line
I just setup my In-laws new machine a few days ago. It has a WD Raptor for C: O/S, a Seagate 640Gb for D: Data, and the WD My Book 500Gb external attached at boot up and it hasn't experienced any problems like that. Have you checked your Bios boot sequence? Mine doesn't even show the My Book listed in the boot sequence list. Maybe disallow boot from usb also (if your bios has that option)?
If you google around, this seems to be a problem that's specific to WD externals. I've tried everything, including omitting usb from boot, but I still get a 4 minute start up instead of 40 seconds with the drive plugged in. So you are not alone. If anyone has a definite fix, I'd be interested too. philby
That's odd then. I wonder why my in-law's machine isn't acting that way. It takes the same amount of time to boot w/ or w/o the My Book attached. The only other thing that I did was move all of the factory files/folders into a new folder to clean it up a bit. I only use the drive to auto backup with Synchback SE but I still wanted to organize it a bit. It has an Asus p5b deluxe mb, e6600, 2 gig ram, stock settings (no o/c). For reference, their WD My Book p/n is WD5000H1U-00. I don't see a build date but it was bought about a month ago @ newegg.
This isn't specific to WD as I have a Seagate FreeAgent Pro external that does the same thing. It is a BIOS issue. With my current mobo I had one BIOS revision that did this and one that didn't. You can try to disable USB boot support, it may or may or help.
Not necessarily BIOS related. Ran into problems with a tower not being able to shut down with a USB device plugged in. Different, but still USB related. The suggested are not how I solved my problem but hope they may be of help in your case. Try uninstalling\reinstalling all USB root hubs in device manager. Make sure they are set to not allow the computer to turn off this device under power management. If this does not help you could try clearing\resetting the upper and lower filters in the registry.