Won't Boot While External Drive Connected

Hi, I'm new here. My Toshiba sk8 will not boot if I leave my WD external hard drive connected and there are other usb devices connected as well, for example a flash drive or mouse. If however I remove all other usb devices but leave the external hard drive plugged in, the computer will boot just fine. I know the problem is not the external drive because I tried it with another laptop and it worked just fine while other another usb device was connected to the laptop at the same time. I also know that the problem is not with the other usb devices because my computer boots just fine with the other usb stuff connected.

Would anyone know what the problem could be? I would like to be able to leave the external drive connected instead of unplugging it everytime I want to turn on the computer. Thanks.

 

Go into you cmos and remove boot from usb hard disk make sure hard disk before go to usb disk

 

Can you explain how to do this? I don't know much about the techie side of computers.

 

What andy is saying is, boot into your BIOS, find your boot settings. If there's an option for boot from usb drive, disable that, then in the boot order (which lists cdrom drive, hard drive, floppy etc), make sure your hard drive is listed first.
Depending on the model, when you first turn on your computer, you would hold F12, or DELETE to boot into the BIOS.
Tread carefully, don't mess with too many settings if you don't know what you're doing.

And welcome to NBR. Enjoy your stay, you'll learn a lot if you stick around.

 

I think might be f2 or ecs on on toshiba for bios too

 

I'm afraid to enter bios, I wouldn't know what I'd be doing. While looking around my computer I came across something called Toshiba Hardware Setup in the control panel. I clicked on it and there is a tab that's labeled Boot Priority, in it this is what is listed and in this order:

HDD
FDD
CD/DVD
LAN
USB Memory

Is this the same thing that I would see if I was in bios? It doesn't have an option to disable anything but I can rearrange the order.

 

yes that shound be same option as you get bios just make sure hard disk is at top you shound be good go

or cdrom then hard

 

The HDD is at the top but my computer won't boot. Do you think that it might be something to do with drivers and not the boot priority?

 

Sounds like a resource problem to me. Boot your computer up then plug in all your usb stuff, go into your device manager right click on each usb device go to properties and check for resource conflicts and adjust as necessary. Hope this helps,

 

I was finally able to get my laptop to boot by disabling the usb legacy from the hardware setup utility. My question now is, what exactly is usb leagcy and by disabling it, will it have any negative affects on my laptop? So far my computer is working fine and I haven't noticed anything different other than now I can get it to boot with the external drive connected.