Yesterday I couldn’t get my machine to boot. Yes, it was custom built by me but it has been working just fine for the past year until recently. A few days ago while I was in the middle of buying stuff from Amazon.com, my flat screen displays went blank and posted a message that there was no signal. I bought a replacement video card, newer model of the same brand, and everything was back to normal. Almost normal though. I noticed that my multi-card reader wasn’t working well and the USB port on it had stopped working.

Then yesterday the computer would not boot at all. I tried everything, even taking out all the hard drives, video card, and unplugging just about everything. All I got was a long single tone which said it didn’t like the video card. I couldn’t believe it, not even the keyboard was active so I could hit F2 and get to the BIOS.

I unplugged one of the USB cables and plugged the keyboard into a PS2 to USB adapter to see if that would get the keyboard active. The computer booted normally. Now I was really perplexed. Could it be that a USB cable could cause all this trouble. I saw that the cable I had removed was to my iPod Shuffle which was still in the dock. I couldn’t imagine why this would have caused all these problems but I was very happy that my computer was back to normal.

At work today I told my IT guy about my problems and how I resolved them. He told me that the iPod Shuffle was probably the problem. I couldn’t believe it but I was dying to know why. He said that the computer was probably trying to boot off a USB device and since the iPod Shuffle was there, it was trying to use it. His advice was to modify the boot order in the BIOS to make sure that USB was the last item.

I won’t be leaving any USB devices plugged in anymore when I shut down my computer.