Please back up everything. Make your restore disc(s) and be ready if your hard drive goes south this afternoon. That way, you’ll be ready if it does. The reason I say this is that it is odd that a memory card would bother the boot process at all.
Please try the following only after you’ve backed it up first:
You might try running a check disk–open the Run window (either by pressing R with the Windows key held, or if you don’t have a Windows key, press Start, Run) and type:
chkdsk c: /r
and press OK. A DOS-style window will open; it should state that it cannot lock the drive. Type Y and press enter; this will let the scan run when the system reboots. Restart it; the scanner will do a detailed scan. If you see a bunch of errors, you may have seen a hard drive failure.
I hate to say this but any type of Flash or USB Ext. Drive will cause the system not to boot up. During the POST the system looks and finds all drives and see’s which one it can try and boot from. It finds a USB Ext Drive or Flash Drive it will try and boot from it. The only way to change it from looking at them is to change the Startup Process and make sure that the Removeable Disk is the last thing that the BIOS will try and boot from and that CD-ROM, Floppy and HDD are in that order.
I realize that the computer will try to boot to a USB drive; I have done this myself. However, this will only give a “No OS” or “Error loading OS” or black-screen-with-flashing-gray-underscore error, and will never boot Windows (OK, if you configured your flash drive’s MBR to point to the hard drive, it will work, but I’m assuming that’s not what’s going on). That system, if trying to boot from an SD card, would not boot at all!
Good point though. If it was me, I would be preparing myself for it to fail. That way, there are no surprises of the bad kind. That’s just sound advice anyhow.
Guys,
It seems to me that there is a known problem with camera memory cards and startup on Windows computers. It is not related to a boot sequence, but as I remember had something to do with a hardware interupt used during the boot sequence and the interference of the memory card. This causes problems on both internal and external card readers. I know it was an issue with our external card reader last year.
Yeah, this was an issue with an empty SD Memory Card Adapter/Extender used to allow my SD card to fit in the slot. I didn’t even realize it was in there. I had my dad take a look at it, which is always a last resort, and he called back saying that I was an idiot. No new news there. Anyhow, it’s back to working perfectly and I see no reason it could fail now. The mouse thing still doesn’t work, but I’ve given up on it. As a precaution, everything is now backed up.
No biggy, now you know how to use the Notke rule. When something stops working go where the last person was. Now on to the mouse…do you have both an internal and external mouse connected? They usually conflict with each other. There may be some software that resets the mouse to a specific operation when you open it.
No, the mouse is just the internal, tap pad. It’s a Synaptics and there are options to change the settings under the mouse part of the control panel. However; when I do that, it usually reverts back to its previous state within 30 minutes or so.
I have a Synaptics pad on my laptop and don’t have a problem. I really like the scroll features on the side and bottom. You might want to peruse the Synaptics website for known issues or driver updates. Same goes for Microsoft. You might not be the only one having this issue.