About 4 weeks ago I had a power surge in my apartment. Ever since then I have had trouble booting from my hard drive(with all my periphials plugged in). I've had my computer in the local shop lots of times and each time it has booted just fine, yet when I get it home and hook everything up I get an error message saying something like "Windows 2000 cannot start because...such and such a system file is missing."

Well last Friday night I decided to follow someone's advice and haul just my computer and monitor and trackball into another room and plug it directly into the outlet. Much to my surprise it booted just fine. I rebooted it several times and each time it booted fine. I then added my surge protector to the chain and again it booted fine. I then hauled everything back into my computer room and repeated the process and each time it booted fine.

Then I started to plug in my periphials one by one. First I added the ethernet connection. Machine booted fine. Then I added my printer. Machine booted fine. Then I added my USB hard drive. Nope. I got that error message again. I unplugged the drive and rebooted several more times each time it was fine. I then plugged the drive back in and it again failed. So I concluded that the problem was either a bad USB cable or perhaps bad USB ports.

I told the guy in the local shop where I work as a cleaner about my discovery and he said he has seen a similar problem with another machine. He said what's happening is when the USB drive is plugged in the computer is trying to boot from it, and since it obviously can't, it gives the error message. I told him wait a minute. In my BIOS my machine is set up to first boot from the DVD drive, and then the hard drive. I told him I've never seen anything mentioned in the BIOS screen about a USB drive. He said he has looked for that info too on another machine but has not found it, but he feels convinced that the reason for the error message is because the computer is trying to boot from the USB drive.

Well his explanation makes sense to me partially. After all the error message on the screen does talk about a kernel file missing, and I also noticed that when the drive is plugged in and I hit restart the light on my USB drive is flashing, like something is trying to access the drive. But it does not explain why I have only seen this error message since the power surge 4 weeks ago. And I'm pretty sure that I have started my computer with the drive plugged in before and experienced no trouble.

So I want to ask you. Is it likely that the reason for the error message is because the computer is trying to boot from the USB drive when it's plugged in? I did try a brand new USB cable but that did not solve the problem. I also tried plugging the drive into a different port but that didn't work either. I did create a simple Wordpad document and saved it to the drive with no problems so it appears the drive itself is okay. What about my theory of the USB ports being fried? Or is the other explanation more plausible?

Think for a minute. USB Hard drive connected... error message. Disconnect USB hard drive...computer boots fine. Bios boot order set DVD/CD, then HD.
Is your bios assigning your USB hard drive as the DVD or looking at the external drive and the primary master? Information is too vague.

Please post your specific BIOS settings as they appear. We can move on from there.

Think for a minute. USB Hard drive connected... error message. Disconnect USB hard drive...computer boots fine. Bios boot order set DVD/CD, then HD.
Is your bios assigning your USB hard drive as the DVD or looking at the external drive and the primary master? Information is too vague.

Please post your specific BIOS settings as they appear. We can move on from there.


How would I determine if my BIOS is assigning the USB drive as the DVD? And why would it? Isn't a USB drive simply a USB drive, and a DVD drive a DVD drive? I'm going to go into my BIOS and look around, but from what I can recall under Boot Device Priority is just says 1st Boot Device = DVD-RW and 2nd Boot Device = WD HD(Western Digital Hard Drive).

Let's try this:

What happens whn you plug the USB drive in after the PC boots?

What happens if you plug the drive in a different PC?

What happens if you install the drive in the PC directly as the slave on the primary IDE channel or the master on the secondary channel?

What happens if you tray another USB device in that port?

Your responses to these questions will help determine if the:

Drive is bad

Drive case is bad

USB port is bad.

I don;t think the PC is trying to boot from the USB drive. I think it cant initialize the USB drive when it trys to boot.

When I plug the drive in after the PC boots Windows sees it and gives it a drive letter and I can access the drive and everything is fine.

Tonight I plugged the drive into a different PC and once again Windows saw it and gave it a drive letter and I could see the contents.

I don't think my USB drive can be installed inside the PC. It is after all an external desktop drive with it's own USB cable and power cord. It doesn't even look like an internal drive does.

I haven't tried any other device in my USB port. Don't know if someone could borrow me one to try. But I have successfully created a text document and saved it to the drive so isn't that indicative of good USB ports?

Don't know what you mean by "can't initialize the USB drive when it tries to boot."

Please confirm the boot order in the bios.

What an amazing problem!
Few things you could try,
Plug that usb drive to another system before boot, and then power that system on and see if similar error occurs.
Start your system with some other usb device plugged in and see what happens.(oh o, if you manage to borrow it)
Reset the CMOS on your pc and then try.

I get an error message saying something like "Windows 2000 cannot start because...such and such a system file is missing."

Looking at the error message, its probably nuthin to do with the boot sequence in the BIOS.

Can't say if the culprit is the usb drive or the mobo.

Windows 2000 cannot start because...such and such a system file is missing
You didn't mention which file this is. It sounds likely to be either ntldr or ntoskrnl or hal.dll. When one of these three files "is missing" it is most commonly due to the boot processes being unable to find either the system partition or the windows/winnt directory on the boot partition.

I have seen an almost identical problem to yours occur when trying to boot using a boot manager while a USB flash memory drive was attached.

This is just a hunch but try adding a line to your boot.ini file under the operating systems that increments the rdisk value by one. Thus if the current line reads
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

add a line that reads

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 With USB Drive" /fastdetect

I don't think the system is trying to boot to the USB device or you would be getting a "invalid system disk" type message. If adding a new rdisk value does nothing try editing the partition value in your new line, while leaving the rdisk value as 0.