TWK:

I suspect that the drive is not powering up fast enough to register when the search for USB devices is done. A hard drive has to come up to speed and stablize before it can be recognized. Some older drives just dont spin up fast enough. To send out a "Here I am signal" Some motherboards have a pre-delay function built into their BIOS Configuration to allow you to delay the boot process untill these drives spin up. Lacking this you may have to live with it or you can try a faster drive. You can try experimenting with hitting the pause/break key half way, quarter way, three quarter way through the boot process to pause the boot process untill the drive spins up.

Norm