A connected HDD prevents me from booting—why?

[marbleduck]

Just recently, my Z87X-OC Force+GTX670 setup stopped working—I would try to boot it with my SSD, and before the Chimera bootloader screen even showed up, it would hang.

Isolated the problem to one of my HDDs, my 2TB backup disk. If the drive was plugged in on startup, it wouldn't even load the bootloader (from either USB or SSD); if the drive wasn't plugged in, it would start without a hitch.

So I backed up my backup, and wiped the drive. Funnily enough, even though it was absolutely empty of everything, it still caused the same problem.

Tried the drive in different SATA ports too—same issue.

Has anyone else run into this problem, and does anyone know a solution for it?

 

[Going Bald]

Just recently, my Z87X-OC Force+GTX670 setup stopped working—I would try to boot it with my SSD, and before the Chimera bootloader screen even showed up, it would hang.

Isolated the problem to one of my HDDs, my 2TB backup disk. If the drive was plugged in on startup, it wouldn't even load the bootloader (from either USB or SSD); if the drive wasn't plugged in, it would start without a hitch.

So I backed up my backup, and wiped the drive. Funnily enough, even though it was absolutely empty of everything, it still caused the same problem.

Tried the drive in different SATA ports too—same issue.

Has anyone else run into this problem, and does anyone know a solution for it?

After connecting the drive did you boot to BIOS and make sure your OS X boot drive was first in HDD boot order? Failure to do this can cause the system to try to use the last installed/connected drive as the boot drive.

 

[marbleduck]

After connecting the drive did you boot to BIOS and make sure your OS X boot drive was first in HDD boot order? Failure to do this can cause the system to try to use the last installed/connected drive as the boot drive.

Yes, I manually select my startup drive when I boot.

 

[marbleduck]

Bump.

 

[EddyMac]

I had this exact problem. Made no sense to me. I finally took out the drive and put it in another computer, wiped it with Disk Utility, then put it back. Problem went away. The problem started when I updated to 10.9.4. It was the LiMac build in my signature.

It took me hours upon hours to figure out that this particular drive was the problem causing the hang.