Booting With External Drive Connected

[Rian Gray]

I have 4 drives connected to my iMac, one of which is Time Machine backup drive.

Every time I try to boot with the external drives connected to the machine, it stays in gray booting screen. It doesn't stop or halt, I simply need to disconnect or turn off my drive docks. I certainly checked startup disk setting, it was set to Mac.

Has anyone encountered this kind of problem before? I never had such problem before, so I'm not sure if this is ordinary behavior.

 

[campyguy]

I have - with USB3-capable drives, but not with TB drives or a old G-Tech eSATA RAID drive connected via a (really cheap) USB-eSATA adapter. I have also experienced what you're describing when I have an HDTV connected via HDMI, maybe 1 out of 20 times.

None of the cables I'm using are "cheap", and it's random. And annoying...