Emergency disk not booting IF another external disk is connected

[wbrells]

I recently installed Hasleo Backup Suite on an older Toshiba notebook system and had no trouble making an initial system backup onto a USB-connected external HDD. I then made an Emergency USB recovery disk and it boot fine AS LONG AS THE USB BACKUP DISK IS NOT CONNECTED. If the backup disk IS connected, the emergency USB disk will not boot - it flashes for a few seconds and then the notebook screen just shows a flashing cursor at the top left of the screen. (There is no error message.) Clearly, this isn't a good situation since I can't do a a system restore if the backup disk isn't available! Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated!  Wayne

[Froggie]

Disk discovery is usually done after WinPE/RE (the OS used on the Recovery Media) is up and running.  I would try BOOTing up the Rescue Media first then plugging in the external disk before you do anything else... it should work just fine.

The BOOTing up with the external disk plugged in sounds like a BiOS issue, not a Hasleo issue... like maybe that disk is marked BOOTable (Active) but has no real structure to BOOT up.  You should be able to get around that by removing the BOOTability of that disk, or worst case, position it in the BiOS BOOT order as the last device to use.

[wbrells]

Froggie, Many thanks! After a little experimenting it seems that the following steps need to be taken:

1) Power off the system
2) Insert the Emergency USB flash drive
3) Power on the system and keep tapping F12 to bring up the boot selection menu
4) BEFORE selecting the boot device, plug in the USB connected backup drive
5) In the boot device menu select the Emergency USB and hit Enter

The Emergency flash drive now boots and brings up the Hasleo program. The external backup disk is now available and can be used for restores, etc.

I'm not sure why this particular notebook system is so "fussy", but all is well now that I know the steps that need to be followed!

Thanks again,
Wayne