Delayed boot if external drive is plugged in

Anyone else notice that their Alienware M14x R1 on BIOS A03 takes an additional like 3 minutes to boot (at the BIOS screen) when you have a USB drive (flash drive, external HDD that is turned on, etc.) plugged in?

 

so unplug it

 

is there an option in bios to disable usb boot?

 

I'm not sure with Alienware, but on my crappy-good old Desktop, you can set it in the BIOS at the boot section, to prioritize the drives, and when in that, you must also have your external drive plug in as well, in order for the computer to detect it when in that BIOS setting.

For my old PC BIOS setting, it's look like this (I made that up but it will look similar like that I show below):

Priority Boot:
1. Optic Drive
2. Disk Drive
3. Network Drive
4. USB Drive

Note: This is applied to any HP Desktop BIOS that made before 2007 only. But I believe all of the BIOS setting is not so different from each other much.

 

I think that your M14x tries to boot on your external device, as CGSDR explained. That's why it's taking so much time to boot.
There is an option in the BIOS that allows you to change the boot order just as the post above stated

PS : I'm pretty sure mine boots exactly the same with my external USB HDD plugged in

 

Oh, my boot order was already DVD drive, HDD, network, USb

 

Was your m14x upside-down when you tried to boot ?
If not, I don't know why it took so long.

Is there a CD or DVD in your DVD Drive ? It might be the cause of your problem, external HDD or not.

 

Hmm now it boots normally. And my BIOS doesn't even have an option for USB boot. Right now it's set at

HDD
ODD
Network

 

Are you pluged into the USB 2 or 3 ports? I am not 100% on this but I dont believe the USB 3 ports are seen in bios for boot.

Also your USB is not going to be read as USB if you have a HDD pluged into it, it will read as a HDD. This means that during boot up it will do a check across the drive to get infomation from it.

Quick fix. Turn it off or unplug it. Otherwise double check to see if there any firmware updates for your ext drive or try it on another computer to verify its not the drive causing the issue.

 

My drives are plugged into a USB hub which is plugged into my USB 2 port. The boot from USB in the boot options do not show up even when the drives were turned off.

 

As mentioned above this could happen when the drive is trying to be booted from. I had an issue where my drive had no bootmgr error so either I unplugged it, or better, I downloaded EasyBCD and made my own boot menu for that drive to load my internal drive automatically. Boot times are no different now to when it's plugged in or not (USB3 by the way).

 

For the HDD, usually it will show you the name of the HDD, did you check the name that it list is your internal hard drive instead of your plugged in external drive?

 

perhaps it's also checks if the usb device is an ext DVD drive.. since you had DVD as 1st priority before it was normal..