Today I was called to check out a computer that would not boot.
As it turned out, the problem was that he had a USB printer attached that was powered. It happened to be a Canon Pixma printer that was plugged into the wall for power and p...lugged into the laptop via USB.
Here's the deal. USB ports are powered. Not only that, but many of today's printers have card readers, which show up as drive letters on your machine. So what happened in this case was that the laptop was looking to be booted from a USB device such as a USB stick or cd-rom, OR another media drive like Compaq Flash or SD chip, etc. See how that works?
Nowadays USB sticks have all but replaced external DVD-RW as the primary or secondary bootable device. From the factory these little ACER ONEs are set to look to boot from a USB device, and if nothing is there to boot from it usually next tries to boot off the hard drive. Sometimes the next boot device might be to boot off the LAN or network.
In my case today, it hung looking to boot from a USB drive letter that had nothing to give back. As soon as we unplugged the USB printer and rebooted the machine, it booted up just fine as normal.
Check out my website: http://www.bigmikecomputerservices.ca/
Happy Computing!
Big Mike
As it turned out, the problem was that he had a USB printer attached that was powered. It happened to be a Canon Pixma printer that was plugged into the wall for power and p...lugged into the laptop via USB.
Here's the deal. USB ports are powered. Not only that, but many of today's printers have card readers, which show up as drive letters on your machine. So what happened in this case was that the laptop was looking to be booted from a USB device such as a USB stick or cd-rom, OR another media drive like Compaq Flash or SD chip, etc. See how that works?
Nowadays USB sticks have all but replaced external DVD-RW as the primary or secondary bootable device. From the factory these little ACER ONEs are set to look to boot from a USB device, and if nothing is there to boot from it usually next tries to boot off the hard drive. Sometimes the next boot device might be to boot off the LAN or network.
In my case today, it hung looking to boot from a USB drive letter that had nothing to give back. As soon as we unplugged the USB printer and rebooted the machine, it booted up just fine as normal.
Check out my website: http://www.bigmikecomputerservices.ca/
Happy Computing!
Big Mike
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