July 4

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Mybook 500 GB, XP and a temporary black screen of death

By Christopher Mendla

July 4, 2008

XP

Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

I almost freaked the other day. Things were really hectic and my weezy old XP machine was running out of hard drive space. I had a couple of gigs of my own video that I could move off to regain some hard drive space.

I purchased a mybook 500GB usb hard drive. It plugged in fine and the drivers installed. I was able to transfer the files with no problem.

The next time I rebooted the machine I ran into a black screen of death. In other words, it would not boot. I tried safe mode and was able to boot that way. I tried to boot normally again (I didn’t want to resort to the ‘last known good configuration’) yet.

Again, the machine hung on boot with a black screen. I thought about it and remembered adding the Mybook hard drive. I unplugged its USB connection and the machine booted.

I haven’t had time to play with it yet to figure out how to keep the Mybook drive connected while still allowing the machine to boot.

In all fairness to the Mybook, the problem could be at my end. I have about 10 USB devices plugged into the USB 1.0 ports (Yeah, I know… I’m working on getting a new machine)

I guess the lesson here is that if you get a black screen hang when booting XP, try disconnecting any recently connected USB devices. … worked for me.

Christopher Mendla

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