I have a number of USB drives, one of them I sometimes use to boot the system up as it has some software that I sometimes use, however my other drives are just external hard drives that I have no reason to boot from, however if I connect them up the stupid computer will try to boot from them, so I have to unplug them and restart, is there anyway to edit the HDD so it won't attempt to boot from it?
There may be a better way of doing this, but if I were you I'd just go into the BIOS and make sure the HDD in the computer has boot priority over USB devices. This way, whenever you need to boot from your USB drive (which, it doesn't sound like you do very often), you can just hit F10 or whatever "choose boot device" button to pick your thumbdrive.
I know that but it's still a hassle, it would be nicer if the drive just did nothing when it is plugged in.
^Uh.. what? @Jamtex: If you give the HDD higher priority than USB devices, then it will just boot from your hard drive and ignore whatever is plugged in. If you want to boot from a USB device, all you have to do is hit a button at startup and specify it. I'm pretty sure this is the best option you have, unless you want to disable USB booting altogether like Evangelion said, but that seems to be a bit excessive.
Not really, as this is a feature of the BIOS as others have said. Some BIOS's will try to boot from a drive and move on if it doesn't have a bootable partition or MBR. Unfortunately, some will just hang (which sounds like the problem you are having) if it detects a bootable device that cannot be booted. The best solution does seem to be dropping the priority of the USB drives below your hard drive in the boot order and using the BIOS specific "boot menu" key to boot from the one USB drive you want it to. If your BIOS has that functionality, it is probably something like F7 or F10 and may even be called something obscure like a "BBS Menu". There is only one other alternative that I can think of, and it may or may not be feasible if you move the drives around alot. If it really bothers you, you could set up a "chain" boot loader on each of the USB drives you don't want to boot from. Set up something like GRUB on the USB drives to boot your internal hard drive automatically without user intervention. That way, if your "good" USB drive is present, the system will boot from that. If it isn't, the other USB drives will boot the internal hard drive.
I missread his post as saying he was only having issues with the one that used to be used as a bootable drive... My bad.
