T420 won't boot with phone plugged into USB?

I've got a T420 with a Droid 2 phone plugged into the left side USB port. When I reboot, or resume from hibernation, the T420 locks up. It will resume booting if I unplug the phone. I make use of the phone for a tethered internet connection (posting through it now) so plugging and unplugging it isn't an ideal solution.

Anyone else seen this problem and found a fix?

 

I have that problem with a Sony Walkman on a W520. I don't have a fix, though. I just unplugged it and left it unplugged after trying to boot a couple of times.

 

Try reinstalling your chipset/USB drivers? Is it in a USB 3 port?

 

For me, it doesn't matter which port it is in (or even a USB hub for that matter).

 

Your boot sequence is probably looking first at external devices, then your internal drive. You might find success in bumping your internal drive ahead of your external devices, or put them on the ignore list (then change it back if ever you need to actually boot from a USB device).

 

It's a T420, so no it's not a USB3 port. It's the left-hand side port, but that's the only one I tried. I've just now tried it in the right-hand port and one of the dock ports and it still won't boot.

The screen lights up but it doesn't show the initial Lenovo screen. It just hangs, for at least 5 minutes (that's as long as I waited).

I already had the BIOS configured for booting the other drives first (msata ssd, hd, cdrom and then usb). But it made no difference to go a step further and take the USB drive out of the boot choices (! to disable). Same thing, hangs the boot.

It happens with the phone configured as a Mass Storage Device. If I configure it as a PC the boot works. Android phones are pretty flexible in how they'll operate on USB. So clearly the BIOS is trying to do something with it as a 'drive' but that hangs the boot. It seems odd for the BIOS to be bothering with it even when the USB device is disabled.

Seems like a BIOS bug to me.

 

try to switch off always on usb feature.

 

Perhaps it has something to do with power draw? I've had problems with my workstation at work. Every single USB port has something plugged in, and Windows XP hangs and I have to disconnect everything for it to boot.

Also had that problem with netbooks/slim notebooks and certain USB external optical drives. Only unplugging the optical drive will let Windows boot.

 

I recall seeing something similar happen with my Dell E6410 although I can't remember the details.

John

 

I can get to the Windows loading screen, it'll just stay there and not do anything, though. The Sony Walkman automatically switches modes between a storage device or a media device. It acts as a storage device when booting and a media device after booting into Windows from my experiences. Though, it seems like it fails to automatically do that with my W520. As I said, I just unplugged it and left it unplugged as I was only testing out my USB hub's ports, I don't usually plug it into a computer unless I'm charging it or transferring media to it, so I haven't bothered looking for a solution.

 

Used to have something similar with a WinXP PC and a Razor gaming mouse. With the mouse plugged in it would start, show a blank screen and wait until I unplugged the mouse.. I left it waiting for more then an hour once, still a blank screen. Reinstalled numerous mouse drivers (both Razor end Windows) but never solved the problem. One day I reinstalled Windows for some reason, never happened again

 

I have the exact same problem, and that's with both my Iphone and my Android phone and it happens on all the usb ports.

 

+1 when I connect my HTC Desire (Android) phone to my T420s.

In BIOS I put all the USB devices in the boot process on the ignore list when I first got my laptop so I was especially surprised when I first rebooted it while the phone was connected.

 

Was already off, but tried it either way, made no difference.

 

Ok, so clearly it's not just one kind of USB device causing this problem. What's the next step to get Lenovo to do something about it?

 

Just a thought.: Might the computer think that a connected phone is a bootable network device?

John

 

Shouldn't matter as the phone has it's own power supply. That and it happens regardless of whether the laptop is on AC or batteries.

Which shouldn't matter when booting from anything other than a local HD is configured in the BIOS. But in this case the phone presents itself as a Mass Storage Device, not a network device. So that's a no on both counts.

 

Has anyone gotten any traction with this? I called Lenovo, and they're fairly useless. The guy just wanted me to run a bunch of stress tests on my computer, basically so that he could get off the phone and on the next call.

I'd really like to solve this.

My hardware is a W520, and an HTC Incredible.

 

The last BIOS update was supposed to fix this. But they failed.

 

Two years later and I'd long since forgotten I'd already posted about this. Heh, STFW brings up my OWN posts.

Still no love. The T420 won't boot if there are any external USB drives attached.