I just discovered the source of an intermittent boot problem I have noticed with my new computer. I haven’t Googled it yet, or tried to work out how to fix it. However, it was so bizarre, I wanted to tell someone immediately, and I know at least some of you guys will understand.<\/p>\n
The symptom was that the BIOS intermittently freezes up just before the RAM test. Today, I discovered how to reliably reproduce (and how to avoid) the problem.<\/p>\n
All I need to do to reproduce the problem is to leave an iPod Nano in its USB base during boot-up. All you need to do to work around the problem is to remove the iPod Nano from its base.<\/p>\n
In fact, if I remove the iPod from the base while the BIOS is frozen, the BIOS will immediately unfreeze. <\/p>\n
I have two iPod Nanos. They each cause the problem.<\/p>\n
It isn’t a power-supply overload issue, because I had all of my hard-drives unplugged while I tried to narrow down the cause. I also tried leaving an iPod charging, while unplugging my Samsung D600, but it had no effect.<\/p>\n
I assume it is some fancy “Use the USB-stick as a drive\/cache” feature of the BIOS which is going very, very wrong, but as I said, I haven’t Googled it yet.<\/p>\n
If I didn’t see for myself how tightly correlated the iPod and the BIOS freeze were, I never would have believed it could possibly be related!<\/p>\n
Weird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just discovered the source of an intermittent boot problem I have noticed with my new computer. It was so bizarre, I wanted to tell someone immediately, and I know at least some of you guys will understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,25,21],"tags":[101,326],"class_list":["post-984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doubleplus-geek","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-observation","tag-ipod","tag-motherboards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":985,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984\/revisions\/985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}