Disable USB drives during boot up?

Disable USB drives during boot up? I have 2 external USB harddrives that are on/active during the boot process. I believe that Windows7 is looking at those drives while booting, which is causes bootup to take longer. Is there a way that I can disable these drives until after the OS has booted to the logon screen?
Asked by: Guest \| Views: 183

Total answers/comments: 2

Comments display order:

Guest [Entry]

"Another solution:
Quoted:
I have received a few questions about this method - no it will not disable mice, or keyboards. It only disables storage devices attached to the USB port. This includes hard drives, flash drives, and any other type of USB storage device. And yes, if the user has administrator access they can reverse the changes.

How it operates is simple, we set a
registry key that tells the UsbStor
driver not to load on boot:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor
Start = 4 (Disabled) -
Don’t start the
driver on boot
Start = 3 (Enabled) -
Start the driver on boot"

Guest [Entry]

"For Gigabyte motherboards, you can enable change full support to partial support for USB in the BIOS setup, so USB mouse and keyboards will be connected, but not USB external drives.
Edit: that was not enough, I still could hear BIOS got stuck there waiting for my USB hard drive powering up. So In USB configuration, I disabled mass storage support, so bios ignores USB drives. Don't worry, you will still see your usb hard drives after windows loads."