T430 Won't Boot with USB External Hard Drive Attached

[Peter_S]

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 (2344-BMU) and have attached a Western Digital My Book 3TB external hard drive via one of the USB 3.0 ports.

Unfortunately, I cannot successfully boot or reboot the T430 with the external hard drive connected. I have gone into the BIOS settings and attempted a few changes (for example, I checked and made sure that the internal hard drive comes before the USB drive in boot order sequence) but have not been able to successfully boot the computer with the external drive attached.

Please note, if the WD external hard drive is connected but powered off, the laptop will boot successfully. Only if the external hard drive is both connected and powered on does the boot up process fail.


Any help in resolving this issue would be greatly appreciated!!

[jdrou]

At what point exactly does it fail? Any unusual partition layout on your internal or USB drives?

[automobus]

Did you check for firmware update? Many My Book (maybe yours) present two LUNs: one hard disc drive, and one fake CD-ROM to hold SmartWare and other bloatware.

T430 BIOS Version 2.65 was issued 2014-04-29

UEFI: 2.65 / ECP: 1.13
- (New) Improved the UEFI BIOS security feature.
- (Fix) Fix an issue where the computer was not booted when the multi-LUN mass
storage type of USB hard disk was attached to the computer.