lizardfuel55 on 28/1/2009 at 06:53
Hi, hi. Of course, this is the longest I've gone before my computer running into some more kinky behavior.
I have a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, with OSes Leopard and Windows XP Pro (with SP2) installed on it. The rebooting has been working fine until about a month ago. I realized that none of my external harddrives (I have two, one with a 100 GB capacity and the other with a 250 GB capacity) are detected by Windows anymore, which is pretty unusual. This is when the laptop has nothing plugged into its USB ports, and after XP is loaded and the external HDs are connected, some flickering of the LED light can be seen on the external HD, but besides that there is no other response. The Leopard partition has always been good with this, and so was XP up to this point. Also, if I leave any of my external HDs plugged into the laptop when I'm on Leopard and I reboot into XP, the machine gets as far as restarting, but it freezes just before loading the Windows XP startup (with the blue progress bars). If I forcefully restart it into XP and if I choose Safe Mode, it makes me log into the Adminstrator account but the trackpad freezes. And even after logging in, the machine freezes yet again.
I have, however, discovered a work-around. So far, my solution to the problem has been to make sure I boot XP with absolutely no external HDs plugged in. Once it's all loaded and ready to go, I only insert a thumb or flash drive (1 Gig at the most). It picks it up and reads it instantly. And only after that, I plug in my externals which seem to work then.
This is a pretty long-wounded way to work. Also, the USB connectors seem to work fine with my Wacom tablet and my cordless mouse. So it's just external HDs that seem to cause a conflict.
Also, it might be worthy to mention that the last time Windows had no problem in reading my externals was when I was installing Nero 8, and I don't know if it's the Nero Registry InCD Service (which I had accidently checked to be included with the rest of the installation) that might be inteferring. When I had to reboot after this installation, I wasn't at the computer to hold down the Alt/Option key for it to load Windows XP and so it ended up rebooting into Leopard. When I did log onto XP though, the Nero installation did not resume. I have ran all kinds of virus scans on my computer but they don't seem to find anything wrong.
So would anyone have any suggestions/theories as to why my machine is being so obstinate in detecting my external HDs right away? I hope to solve this redundant problem soon. Thanks so much!
bikerdude on 28/1/2009 at 14:23
Ill have a look into this when I get home..
bikerdude on 29/1/2009 at 14:54
Right, its possibly your drive letter mapping
Plug all your external deivces into your computer and then in Xp right click on my computer and then select 'manage' then click on disk manager and make sure each device has its on drive letter...
lizardfuel55 on 30/1/2009 at 07:31
Thanks for the reply, Biker, but I think I solved it. It was indeed Nero that would keep interfering (it installs an icon in My Computer along with the rest of the drives). I now know that I'll be staying away from it .
Bjossi on 30/1/2009 at 23:04
Bloatware like Nero is a huge waste of system resourced and HDD space, there are plenty of alternatives that blow it out of the water.
