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Check in bios see if you incidently setup the boot order to boot from USB or external device. 
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I have an external USB hard drive and the computer will not boot unless the drive is turned off. &nbsp;It just hangs. &nbsp;The drive functions fine after booting but not until the Win XP screen has come up.
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I have an external USB hard drive and the computer will not boot unless the drive is turned off.  It just hangs.  The drive functions fine after booting but not until the Win XP screen has come up.

Check in bios see if you incidently setup the boot order to boot from USB or external device. 

USB Drive Causes Machine to Hang On Boot

Microsoft Windows XP is the sixth release of the NT series of operating systems, and was the first to be marketed in a variety of editions: XP Home and XP Professional, designed for business and power users. The advanced features in XP Professional are generally disabled in Home Edition, but are there and can be activated. There were two 64-bit editions, an embedded edition and a tablet edition.

Windows XP

Hardware includes cell phones and other digital living devices, tablets, computers, servers, peripherals and components, printers and scanners, gaming consoles, networking hardware such as routers, hubs, switches and modems, storage devices and security equipment such as firewalls and other appliances.

Hardware

Storage devices include any device used for storing and retrieving digital information. Hard disk drives (HDDs) use one or more rigid ("hard") rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. The primary competing technology for secondary storage is flash memory in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs), but HDDs remain the dominant medium for secondary storage due to advantages in price per bit and per-device recording capacity. CD-RW (Compact Disc-ReWritable) is a digital optical disc storage format that allows information to be stored outside the mechanical HDD.