Windows 10 won't start with external drive connected

I have a My Book 8TB External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
The drive seems to be functioning well except that my Windows 10 PC won’t start while the drive is connected. The system hangs up on a black screen with my monitor’s logo. It never brings up Windows and I can’t do anything but shut it down manually. When I disconnect the drive, the pc restarts with no problem. After a few minutes, I can reconnect the external drive and it works fine.

System information (in case it might help):
Dell i5 desktop with 24 GB RAM
1 GB SSD C drive
Windows 10
I also have another WD 4 GB external drive connected

Any suggestions?
Thank you
Kevin

Hi RevKev55,

I would suggest you to try and connect the drive on a different computer to isolate the issue.

thats not gunna help the problem

Maybe not the explanation for your situation but I have so many times made this mistake: if you have enabled usb drives (external drives) as boot devices in your computer’s bios, leaving a non-bootable usb drive or stick could lead to a ‘black screen’ (often with blinking cursor) because the computer tries to boot from that disk but no boot partition exists. This only happens if in the boot order in the bios settings the usb drive ranks higher than the internal drive (which often makes sense). By configuring the bios it is possible to leave usb drives connected and should you at some point do need to boot from a usb stick with backup/restore software for instance then you should enable booting from external drive once again.

Personally I don’t like to keep external drives permanently attached for fear of them being damaged when starting up the computer and concomitant possible internal power peaks, the other reason is that an external drive is not the same as an internal drive if you do use it like that it is better to expand your internal drive(s). The performance is better and possibly they have a better air flow then an external drive. External drives I use for backup and occasional file browsing not for primary file storage.

Install the WD se5 device driver. Worked for me.