Unusually long boot time

I can't quite get a handle on this issue.

Why would having USB drives attached to system increase boot time from 8 seconds to 110 seconds? Never happened on old 560 box, but does on new 3847. Dell says, "That's the way it is". Sounds odd. Nothing in UEFI/BIOS for any Fastboot option. HHmmmm.....

Does not happen on re-start, just power up boot, with or without Fast Startup enabled.

BIOS boot sequence is DVD/USB/HDD. Latest American Megatrends firmware, A07 (3/5/15).

Tried disabling USB boot support, placing USB last in list, UEFI on and off. Nothing seems to affect it. Unplug all USB external drives and cold boot is 8 seconds! Plug back in and boot is around 110 seconds! Must be an answer out there somewhere!!!

Oh, and secondly.... Does anybody know how to take a screenshot of the BIOS screens?

Thanks.....

USB are inherently slower to read than a SATA 6Gb/s SATA 3 HDD. It has to read the MBR.

Cliff S said:

USB are inherently slower to read than a SATA 6Gb/s SATA 3 HDD. It has to read the MBR.

But why only on cold boot, not re-start?

f14tomcat said:

But why only on cold boot, not re-start?

Because Post does not give the spin command on a reboot it assumes the drives are already spinning.

Ok, I'm convinced it's a "by design" issue in newer BIOS/firmware. Old Dell 560 would sometimes wait (progressing green Explorer bar) the first time accessing an external USB drive, then, ok. New 3847 has never done that. Guess it gets all it's "who are you" stuff out of the way on boot, not during normal ops. I can live with all that, I just didn't know the "why", and it was driving me a little (more) bonkers! Will mark as solved, and thanks to all!! Have a good Memorial Day!

In my BIOS pressing F12 will save a screenshot to an attached usb. What model number is the new machine again? You said 3847, what is the full model number

Dude said:

In my BIOS pressing F12 will save a screenshot to an attached usb. What model number is the new machine again? You said 3847, what is the full model number

Inspiron Desktop | Dell

Mystere said:

I've seen this problem before, but on older systems.

My guess is that your system Is searching for a firmware upgrade or some other external boot process when you have a drive connected. You might try plugging it into a different port, as on some systems they specific a specific port for this purpose.
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Good point there, the main drive needs to be connected to the port 0 or 1 whatever is lowest on your mainboard.

I will try and read up on the bios to see if it offers screen shots

Problem solved!

I have 3 1TB external USB drives. WD-2.0, Buffalo-2.0, and a Seagate-3.0. I had all 3 set to use write-cache in the device policy. All worked fine, but the older 2.0 drives set with write-cache caused the POST operations to initialize very slowly, setting up the OS buffers, etc. Those older drives are not really designed to use write-cache, default policy is no cache, so when I set the 2.0 drives to no write-cache and left the 3.0 Seagate (fast drive) to use write-cache, boot time went from 120 seconds down to 9 seconds. Got the timings from Task Manager/Startup in upper right corner, Last BIOS Time.

Go figure! No big deal at all, cause the 2.0 drives are used for movie/photo/junk archive only and the Seagate is my backup drive.

Thanks to all for the input. It was an indirect hint from @Mystere that got me thinking when he said "older systems".