Odd issue when booting with certain external disks connected

Hello all,

Here is a problem I have had for quite some time, but probably underestimated the potentially serious implications of until it just happened again a moment ago.

I am curious if anyone has had similar experiences, and what I can do to explore the issue and hopefully solve it.

The issue has to do with booting my 4530s with certain external hard drives attached. I have had both an Iomega and also a Toshiba external drive do this to me, and I am not sure, but it may have something to do with the drive being plugged into the USB 3.0 port especially.

What happens, is that I will boot the machine with these drives plugged in, and the system will hang for a little while, never reaching the Chameleon OS selector screen. Oftentimes I will realize what I did and turn off the computer quickly, but other times I don't realize, and aside from indefinitely hanging, I can also go to another terrifying screen where it says something like:

EBIOS: Bad Block 01
EBIOS: Bad Block 02
...

Now, sometimes if I turn it off and turn it back on with the drive unplugged, everything is fine.
A moment ago, however, the worst thing possible seemed to happen: my main internal drive unmounts and is stuck unmounted.

I am pretty sure this happened once or twice before, but my configuration was different. IIRC, what I did to fix it before was boot from install USB and mount manually in Disk Utility.

This time around, I had just finished setting up Ubuntu on a partition on my optical bay caddy, so I was able to see it with the USB install key, just loaded up and the other disk remounted fine.

However, I am worried that some day, something as simple as this will result in a much worse situation. Given that I am now triple booting, and using my laptop as my main machine at school and for plenty of work, I just can't have it go down.

Some would fault me for putting so much weight on a hackintosh build, but I am definitely starting to notice that having a triple boot of all these OSes all running natively is definitely giving me an edge in many ways. I don't know how else I'd possibly be able to build a comparable laptop, so I don't want to give up.

As far as I can tell, this is one of the final more serious issues I need to work out. Any help would be much appreciated. I am a bit nervous about intentionally recreating the event to provide more details, but I'm happy to provide any details I can remember from previous times it happened.

Finally, thanks to Rehabman for his awesome multi-boot guide, I couldn't have set up the linux side of things without it.

lunar7 said:

...
The issue has to do with booting my 4530s with certain external hard drives attached.
...

Click to expand...

Easy solution: Unplug external devices while booting.

I have the same error and found the same solution!

I guess I am just a bit curious what is going on here, I assume this is the fault of the disks themselves. I will look into it and report any info I can find, if anything.