Boot Camp: Windows stuck on startup when external hard drive is attached

Hi all,
I have Windows XP installed with Boot Camp. All was working fine (even though I installed Service Pack 3 and THEN the Boot Camp update), but today I received an external hard drive I ordered for use with Time Machine. It's a Western Digital My Book (500GB) connected via Firewire 800. This was working fine in Leopard (of course) but when I restart and go into Windows, the startup process freezes at the Windows XP logo (the animation continues though).
I've spend hours scouring the internet and I understand that the external drive is being mistaken for the boot drive, and Windows being WIndows doesn't think to try my internal hard drive after the external clearly has no boot information on it! I don't appear to be able to change the boot order in BIOS as that apparently isn't available.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I'm just trying to avoid unplugging the hard drive on every restart into Windows.
Thanks in advance!
Ed

happens to my firewire 400 drives too (although it didnt used to until SP3 upgrade...). My 2 cents: the fix is not worth it; just unplug it during startup of windows and plug in when it's booted.

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Hi all,
I am unsure what is the recent changes with Apple boot camp. But when I used boot camp utilitiy on my Mac Pro (Mid 2010) to install windows 7 64 bits. It would not install and created a whole lot of problems.
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Yes, but not exactly. The page says:
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Hi,
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Is it possible to install windows 7 on a partitioned external hard drive and then boot from windows from time to time?

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Hello everyone!
I got a brand new Macbook Pro w/ Retina 13" for Christmas today, and I've ran into an issue. I have a Samsung external hard drive with my documents and photographs on (and nothing else), and if I start up my mac with it plugged in, my computer hangs on the black screen (no Apple logo). If I leave it for 5 minutes, it eventually works. Also, shutdown is very slow as well. I've tried booting without it plugged in, and it works perfectly. I've ran the disk utility on it, and it reports no problem.
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KaiSilverthorne wrote:
Hi CellarDwellr,
My Samsung HDD uses power from the Mac (and I didn't have the mac plugged in when tried). I am going to reformat my external HDD to see if that helps (it's in ExFAT), as I need to in order to use it for Time Machine backups.
I'll let you know if anything works.
Thanks,
Kai
I see. Well, yeah, in order to use it with Time Machine, format it to Mac os Extended (Journaled)

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Boot Camp: Windows stuck on startup when external hard drive is attached

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