In message , Paul
writes:
R.Wieser wrote:
Paul,

Whatever is going on, is some kind of bug.

Maybe, but ...

Thats my (cautious) conclusion too.

You should be careful to review every aspect
of the disks involved (including whether the internal
disk was part of a RAID array or something)
I've checked with two different USB memory sticks, and three
different USB drives. The only constant is the laptops internal HD.

.... I think not in a drive.
[]
What is the history of the hard drive ? Has
it always been a Legacy MSDOS partitioned
disk ? No Dynamic Disk. No GPT/EFI partitions
on it anywhere.

You can back up a drive with Macrium Reflect,
then use DiskPart while on another machine, to
"clean all" and erase every sector on the hard drive.
[]
I yield to your (vastly!) greater knowledge and understanding of hard
(and other) disc partitions and so on; however, I (name's John by the
way) and Rudy think it's something fairly low-level in the machine's
BIOS, which if booted with anything drive-like in a USB socket (memory
stick _or_ real drive via USB adapter), fail to boot. (Rudy has said his
mouse dongle doesn't upset it.) Though on my old netbook, if I got in
early enough to get in to change the boot order (which often took more
than one go), I _could_ get it to boot from a CD in my external (USB)
optical drive. (That's how I always booted Macrium when imaging.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

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