XP: External Disk Drive not recognized in Bios

**JordanLewis856** · 08-02-2012

Hey there, recently my netbook has crashed after being infected with a virus. After getting a blue screen when trying to boot, I went ahead and managed to get official eMachines recovery disks and an external disk drive as the netbook has none. I've set the boot order to USB CDROM but it acts if there is no optical disk drive or a disk in it. The disk spins and the drive flashes green so it's not the drive. Why isn't bios recognizing the USB device?

**ApPy10** · 08-02-2012

Have you checked in the Bios setting whether there is a disk controller setting from AHCI to IDE in the BIOS setup, try to change it and see if it is recognizing the external hard drive. Also, doesnt the netbook has a internal hard drive or SSD where you can freshly install the windows operating system again or even recover it.

**JordanLewis856** · 08-02-2012

Switching from AHCI to IDE doesn't seem to do anything. Keep in mind this is an external DISK cd rom drive not harddrive. Oddly, if I leave the external disk drive's tray open it shows up on the boot manager screen. But if the netbook is booted up with the drive closed and disk spinning it is not recognized in the Boot Manager or bios boot priority.

I'll post a synopsis about my issue to see if anyone can come up with an alternative method. Netbook got a virus, I tried using a Spyware remover and it seems that using that I may have deleted the wrong files causing the netbook to crash. When booted up, it allows me to choose from

Windows Xp Home Edition, or Windows XP Setup. Choosing Setup takes me to a "Disk read error: Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to reboot" yet pressing the keys does nothing and I have to manually reboot. The system does not run with any safe mode or Last Good Configuration. My last resort was getting eMachines recovery disks and an external disk drive which of course like I expected doesn't work. So here I am. Like I said before the drive is only recognized when the tray is open.

**T.J.** · 08-02-2012

What is the make or model of the disk drive? Have you tried diagnosing the cable to see whether it is at fault or even tried the same drive in some other computer/laptop to see if it is not at fault. You must also have "Legacy USB" support enabled in the BIOS in order to be able to boot from USB, this way it should be recognized.