Your BIOS is probably set to boot from a USB... and im guessing you dont have an operating system on the drive :) Remove USB boot from your bios <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 3:08 PM, Robert Citek <<a href="mailto:robert.citek@gmail.com">robert.citek@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Hello all, I have an Ubuntu machine (dual boots 8.10 and 9.04) that has an external USB drive (Verbatim 1TB). If try rebooting or power-cycling the machine with the drive powered on, the system does not complete the boot process and drops me into a busybox shell. That is, these steps work: - power-off machine, power-off drive, power-on drive, power-on machine - power-off machine, power-off drive, power-on machine, power-on drive - power-off drive, power-off machine, power-on drive, power-on machine - power-off drive, power-cycle machine, power-on drive - power-off drive, reboot machine, power-on drive This does not work: - power-cycle machine with drive kept on - reboot machine with drive kept on I suspect that some signal is being sent to the drive during shutdown that puts the drive into an unusable state that can only be reset by power-cycling the drive. Is that correct? If so, then I have two questions: 1) is there a way to prevent the drive from going into that state? 2) is there a way to resurrect the drive from that state without power-cycling the drive? Regards, - Robert -- ubuntu-us-mi mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-us-mi@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-us-mi@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-mi" target="_blank">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-mi</a> </blockquote></div> -- Aaron VanSledright