My Book 4 TB External Drive interferes with boot process

WD External Drives External Drives
1

Hi,

I recently purchased My Book 4 TB and connected it to the USB 3.0 Hub.

Thereafter, I noticed that whenever I switched on the laptop, the laptop would freeze right at POST (Power On Self Test).

After a lot of debugging, I figured out that My Book is interfering with the POST process. After disconnecting My Book from the USB Hub, the laptop boots perfectly fine, but if I reconnect My Book to the USB Hub and the switch on the laptop, the laptop freezes at POST.

However, My Book is working perfectly fine after I reconnect it to the USB Hub once Windows 10 has loaded.

As I continued to debug that what exactly is causing the laptop to freeze at POST, I found that my laptop is using UEFI & Secure Boot whereas My Book is formatted exFAT, which is incompatible with the current setup.

I thought to split the partition into two, 1 GB for Primary NTFS and the remaining space for Secondary exFAT, but the partitioning software won’t allow splitting the parting as exFAT is not supported.

The other option is to delete the partition and then create two new partitions with the above specifications. But since I have already copied a huge amount of data, I will have to move the data to the other drive, which is a time-consuming process.

Apart from this, are there any working solutions which any of you have faced and fixed it.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

2

I found at least 3 links that particularly refer to this problem, but hardly any solution apart from formatting the drive in NTFS.

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3

And this one,

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4

Any help will be highly appreciated.

5

Hi @AlokSharma,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask

6

Hi @Keerti_01,

As per your suggestion, I have created a support case, Incident: 220726-003184.

Thanks

7

Just to let everyone know that the problem has been finally resolved. The support team suggested reformatting My Book in NTFS format.

As mentioned in my original post, the issue was because of exFAT, which is incompatible with UEFI & Secure Boot.

So, the only option left was to copy the data to another drive and then reformat My Book in NTFS format.