AOA150 Fails to boot when flash drive plugged in

Discussion in 'Laptop Hardware' started by thewibs, Sep 11, 2009.

  1. thewibs

    thewibs

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    I have a pretty strange problem that I really can't seem to figure out... For some reason, if my flash drive is plugged in to my Aspire One at start-up, it will not proceed past the Acer splash screen... And when I have "quick boot" disabled, it looks like it hangs up when it is detecting drives.

    At first I thought it was maybe a corrupt hidden file or something on my flash drive that was causing it to hang up, since I've used the flash drive to boot from before (I installed Windows 7 from it). So I reformatted the flash drive to FAT32 using the Windows format utility, and I restarted the computer. It still hung up at the same spot. My next thought was a BIOS problem, so I tried resetting the BIOS to default settings. That didn't fix anything, so I reinstalled the BIOS. That still didn't do anything, it still hangs up in the same place. I tried plugging in a different thumb drive to the computer and it booted up just fine, and I also tried plugging the problematic thumb-drive in to a different computer and that computer booted up just fine.

    I'm completely at a loss as to how this one thumb drive could cause my aspire one to freeze up at boot when there is nothing at all on it, and it does not cause similar problems in other computers... Does anyone know of a possible solution to fix this?
     
    thewibs, Sep 11, 2009
    #1
  2. thewibs

    jerryt

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    A wild guess.

    The flash drive is seen as a USB-HD (not as USD-FD or USB-CD) by the bios, and when you plug it in, the bios adds it to the top of the hard drive boot list.

    You can test this theory by pressing F12 at boot and selecting the boot drive (Your hard drive), if that works then it is the type of flash drive formatting which is causing the problem, USB-HD.
     
    jerryt, Sep 11, 2009
    #2
  3. thewibs

    thewibs

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    It completely freezes right when the splash screen comes up. It doesn't allow me to press F2 to enter setup or F12 to select the boot device once it begins to start-up with the flash drive plugged in. Ctrl-alt-del doesn't even work to restart it. My only option at that point is to press and hold the power button until the computer shuts down, then unplug the drive and turn it back on...
     
    thewibs, Sep 12, 2009
    #3
  4. thewibs

    elitestorm

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    i have same problem.i used format tools and MBR tools for my flash drive but nothing changed.updated bios to 3310 as you guess nothing changed again.My flash drive works well with my desktop computer for boot but it doesnt work with AOA 150 netbook.(Flash Drive is Verbatim STORE N GO 4GB).anyone has an idea?
     
    elitestorm, Aug 7, 2010
    #4
  5. thewibs

    RockDoctor

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    I've encountered this problem in the past, and it's been cured by reformatting the flash drive. The best tool I've encounted to enable a fix is the Fedora (Linux) livecd-iso-to-disk utility, which is used to create a bootable live Linux system on the flash drive. Not sure what to suggest given that you're starting from Windows.
     
    RockDoctor, Aug 16, 2010
    #5
  6. thewibs

    donec

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    What happens when you are booted into Windows and then insert the USB drive?
     
    donec, Oct 22, 2011
    #6
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