Yesterday I purchased the OneTouch 4 750Gb drive to replace a failed Cavalry 500Gb drive, both use USB connections. I have an Alienware Area 51 gaming machine, WinXP Pro, 1gb ram, and 8 USB ports, with a 480W PSU.
When I first plugged in the drive it was immediately recognized. I can access it, write to it no problems. Installed the Maxtor Manager software, again no problems. The problem came when I rebooted my machine - it refused to come back up. I get the Alienware splash screen where you can get to the BIOS, but that's where it sat and went no further in the boot process. I couldn't power the machine off either.. so I reluctantly had to power everything off at the power strip.
Suspicious, I disconnected the OneTouch and restarted the machine, and it seemed to be going along just fine - and then I got an error message from the AMI Bios that 'overclocking failed' (no, I have not overclocked it since I purchased it) and to go into Setup - which I did, made NO changes, exited and the machine went on to load Windows normally. I tried a re-start again, w/o the OneTouch attached, and the machine booted up and loaded Windows without a single error, smooth as can be. I can plug in the OneTouch, the system sees it and I can use it.
To experiment to see if the problem was reproducible, I did a re-start on the machine with the OneTouch attached... the EXACT same scenario repeated itself - same hang on bootup, same forced power off, disconnected the OneTouch, restarted the machine, same BIOS error, everything, I repeated the entire sequence.
I went over to Alienware Support and found someone with a nearly identitical problem with a Seagate Freeagent 500gb drive - and the Alienware tech suggested that the external drive was somehow messing with the PC's bios. While that doesn't make a lot of sense to me why that would be, I have to ask here - DOES the external drive somehow mess with the BIOS ?
I checked my BIOS bootup sequence for drives, my optical is first, then my hard drive, and then my secondary internal hard drive. Nowhere is a USB device in the bootup order.
Any ideas ?? Any solutions ?? Basically this means I can't leave the drive connected at night when my anti-virus software update might reboot the pc at 2am. Or anytime that I might have to reboot, I'll have to disconnect the OneTouch. This is disturbing, to say the least. I didn't have this problem with the dead Cavalry drive, so I don't think it's a matter of bandwidth.
Thanks !
