USB Drive on Server May Affect Rebooting
More and more people are hooking up USB hard drives to their servers to do daily or image backups. A word of caution: if you find that your server will not reboot, it may be due to your USB drive getting in the way. Unplug your USB drive and if the server reboots, then you know the cause.
How do you fix it? Simple ... repartition your USB hard drive as an "Extended Partition".
Chances are your USB drive is formatted as a primary partition, and a primary partition will be scanned as a boot device. Changing it to an Extended Partition will ensure that the system does not consider this drive as a bootable device.
To change your USB drive from a primary to an extended partiton, perform the following steps:
1. Go to Disk Manager (Right click 'My Computer', click Manage, click Disk Management)
2. From Drive Manager, right click on the USB drive and click "Delete Partition"
3. Right click again and click "Create Partition"
4. Then click "Extended Partition" and let it default to use the whole disk as the partition
5. Then right click and select "Create Logical Drive" and again let it default to use the entire partition
Cheers!