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I am looking for understanding to a boot issue. I have at times had some files and such that I save and retrieve from my thumb drive. I use the front panel as it is nice and easy to get to and I typically power down my system nightly. If I forget to pull the drive and power on the system, it becomes the first bootable device. As there is no OS on the USB Drive I get the BOOTMGR is missing press CTRL+ALT+DELETE.

When I go into BIOS to see Boot sequence, there’s the thumb drive up top, DVD drive is missing and not found in the list of devices. All of the hard drives are next in line.

When I pull the USB drive, and reboot, everything is back to normal. Old boot sequence is in place, DVD drive right where it should be and no issues. So why does this happen with a USB drive in port at boot up? If it can’t be booted from, shouldn’t the next drive be attempted?

Note: This happens when the thumb drive is plugged into a USB port on the front panel. It does not seem to happen on rear panel ports.

Edit: The front panel is a 5 1/4" mutil card reader with 2 USB ports and front audio ports.

Additional results from testing -

Swapped Kensington (the one involved with boot issue) with an OCz drive and no problems booting.

Test info - H2Test results problems

Warning: Only 3788 of 3833 MByte tested. The media is likely to be defective. 3.6 GByte OK (7651291 sectors) 52.0 MByte DATA LOST (106533 sectors) Details:22 MByte overwritten (45056 sectors) 0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors) 30.0 MByte corrupted (61477 sectors) 22 MByte aliased memory (45056 sectors) First error at offset: 0x000000006e287000 Expected: 0x000000006e287000 Found: 0x00000000b16d3000 H2testw version 1.3 Writing speed: 8.20 MByte/s Reading speed: 16.6 MByte/s H2testw v1.4

I am still curious how this would skew the boot order.

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Are you really sure about the "It does not seem to happen on rear panel ports" part? Have you test them several times and get consistent result? Otherwise it does not make sense –  Chin Oct 25 '12 at 5:08
I get consistant result in the front. And I have one plugged into the back that I have no issue with. I don't pull it out like the front panel. I am thiking the front panel is having some issue. Mind you, this is a a 3rd party add on card reader, usb,front audio panel combo that fits in a 5 1/4 bay. So the case jacks and usb ports are not hooked up. –  Carl B Oct 25 '12 at 5:39
Ah, that additional info. makes it quite likely that it's a hardware (card-related) issue (I'm talking of the DVD drive disappearing from boot order list), especially since the rear ports are not similarly affected. –  Karan Oct 25 '12 at 5:41
@Karan - I tested with another drive and no issue. I added info to the question. going to test drive next for faults. –  Carl B Oct 25 '12 at 6:13
So with the OCZ the DVD drive showed up as well? In any case this is the first time I'm hearing of a drive causing the bootmgr missing error, and another drive causing no such issues without any settings being changed. Are you sure the OCZ was freshly partitioned/formatted as well so that no boot manager on it could possibly be booting from the hard drive? –  Karan Oct 25 '12 at 6:16

1 Answer 1

When you went up-to the step of checking the Boot Device priority, I'm wondering why you did not change the same?

The boot sequence is important and determines which device is given a priority while booting up. USB devices are listed only if they are connected. And hence, in your case it was listed when you had your USB plugged-in. Since it was assigned a higher priority than your hard drive, it caused the observed issue.

You can change the sequence of devices and choose the Hard Drive to be the 1st boot device.

Also, you should try formatting your USB thumb drive once!

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agree, formatting the thumb drive may clean it of remnant of previous OS installed on it, which might be the culprit –  Chin Oct 25 '12 at 5:09
DVD drive is what I want for first boot then SDD then HDD. The question is why does the USB even get into the first deveice spot, kick out the DVD drive and not move on to the SSD? –  Carl B Oct 25 '12 at 5:34
I have come across a few BIOSes that had a toggle option like "always boot from USB drives first". See if your BIOS has something similar and turn it off. –  Karan Oct 25 '12 at 5:40
Like I said (and so does @Chin ), you should try formatting your USB flash drive. I've faced similar issues previously, and formatting did help. There could be certain files in the flash drive which could cause the boot manager to look into it as a potential boot device. Also, the USB device may be been previously formatted to be a bootable device. Reformating would solve the issue in both the cases. –  AbhishekGirish Oct 25 '12 at 5:40
@Karan - will look at it now and report back. –  Carl B Oct 25 '12 at 5:42

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