I couldnt figure out the right place to put this so please be tolerant.

My symptom is every time i reboot a machine with my ac powered maxtor one touch backup and buffalo external hard drives the machine will not boot.

I turn them both off and instantly the computer resumes booting up.

Could anyone tell me why 3 of my computers do this?

computers are XP HOME, XP PRO, and windows server 2003

Hi this is a very common problem with USB hard drives and some MP3 and MP4 players do the same thing. The first thing to try to fix this type of thing would be to try a bios update on the PC's. But this may not fix the problem for all of them

Opps I almost forgot Also check in the bios it is not set to boot from the USB