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My Quadcore setup had started to give me bother over the past few weeks so I decided to find out what was wrong. When I overclocked the MB the system would not boot. To cut a very long story short I discovered that the external USB HDD that was plugged in was preventing the system from booting. I can attach it after the system boots but not before.

More importantly than that though is the new OC that I managed. Spurred on by fixing the problem I decided to have another go at overclocking the setup beyond my normal daily stable, as follows

The core system is
CPU : Intel Core2Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz, Standard Intel Heatsink 7 Fan
RAM : 4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1333Mhz CAS9 (4 x 1GB Modules)
MB : Gigabyte GA-P35T-DQ6, F5 Bios

Standard Config, No OC
266Mhz x 9 multiplier = 2.4GHz

My Normal OC (Before today)
340Mhz x 8 Multiplier = 2.72GHz (8 multiplier was used to step down CPU but increase ram)

My New OC (Liking this a lot)
380MHz x 9 Multipler = 3.42GHz (plus ram is up again)
Temp : 42 Degrees

Hot Trout wrote:My Quadcore setup had started to give me bother over the past few weeks so I decided to find out what was wrong. When I overclocked the MB the system would not boot. To cut a very long story short I discovered that the external USB HDD that was plugged in was preventing the system from booting. I can attach it after the system boots but not before.

That's what happens with my computer. Just go into your BIOS and change the boot order to skip the USB before checking the HDD and you'll fix that issue of having to manually reconnect an external HDD after booting. Just remember to change it back around if you need to boot from USB later. :p

If I'm not mistaken when you boot with your external HDD connected it states:

"Disk error. Press any key to reboot."

The only difference with me to you is that I haven't overclocked my processor, and that wasn't the cause of the error when booting with my 32GB USB Flash Stick.

Its weird cause Ive never had this kind of problem before. Ive been through plenty of help pages about other issues ive had and alot of them say to make sure nothings plugged in when you reboot as that may be causing some problems. It just strikes me as funny that ive never run into this problem, even with stuff plugged in.

I have had this happen too. where it tries to boot from my external USB Disk.