During Windows 7 Start-up I see a black screen for 30s

Firstly, this is my rig: http://www.techcomet.com/p/my-gadgets.html

The thing I am having problem with is my WD 1TB External HD on Win 7 x64

What happens is two things:

1. If I enable legacy support for External USB Hard Drives, before the boot starts the Logo of the motherboard shows for about 30s before the boot starts. If I disable legacy support this Logo only shows for about 1s.

2. Disabling legacy support, however means that after I boot and I see the Windows Logo, there is a period of about 30s when the screen goes black and stays back. I have a feeling that a scan of the external HD is being done at this point.

So, it looks like I have to wait either way. Is there anything I can do to ensure that I don't have that black screen. It is only 30s, but I have a SSD and my boot time is about 10s in total!

According to your motherboard manual, there is no "Legacy Support for USB Hard Drive" section in the BIOS. There is a "USB Storage Devices" section though, and that should be enabled.

Don't have your external USB drive turned on and you won't have the issue.

Thanks, sorry I meant USB Storage Devices.

Why should it be enabled? And like I said enabling it slows down the boot time by quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the WD does not have an on/off switch, I have to pull the plug which like I said I may forget to turn on

It needs to be turned on so you can use the device, plus the BIOS enables the chipset to recognize the external hard drive.

The POST section of the mobo sometimes takes a little longer than normal when you have such devices enabled.

I have an eSATA external hard drive and it is routed through the Gigabyte SATA connection which used the Gigabyte RAID controller chipset. When I have the drive turned on during POST, it will slow the process by about an additional 15 seconds or so. No big deal really.

The TRUE boot time of the computer begins when the POST is done and you see the black screen with the Windows 7 fireflies appear.

I find it unusual that your WD external drive does not have an on/off switch. I guess that's why I have always bought 3rd party external cases and put the drive of choice in them.

I feel that's usually a less expensive and better solution for me. I'm really picky about the look of the external case and I prefer Samsung or Seagate hard drives.

The WD case is quite nice, at least in my opinion, but yes the lack of an on/off switch is quite annoying.

Is there any specific reason that it needs to be enabled? I mean like I said the external hard drive is detected fine in Windows anyway.

Well then if its working fine without enabling the option, then don't worry about it.

BTW, you can turn off the Logo screen display in the BIOS if you want to. I do so i can see if there are any issues when the POST begins. I have found that turning off the Logo display usually speeds up the start-up too by a few seconds.

Yes I already disabled the logo screen...I guess it's called the POST!

I re-enabled the USB Legacy Support and POST is taking a few seconds longer. However, for some reason when I boot up windows 7 AFTER the (blue, red, yellow and green window) logo fades out, the screen remains black. Again not sure why this is happening suddenly.

Are there any logs for me to see why this is happening?

WD makes 1TB pocket drives now, switches are becoming a thing of the past. The cases are getting smaller and smaller, you just power it through USB and go.wdfMP_SEEssential.jpg