Brand new Dell PC not booting with printer connected?

youcancallmeal

My friend bought a Dell PC and asked me to give him a hand setting it up. Everything was going fine until we got to the printer. Its a Dell 946. I installed the drivers and software as per instructions and printed a test and everything was fine until I went to reboot the PC. It gets stuck halfway through the BIOS loading screen and just freezes. So I plugged out the printer and the PC booted fine. Tried re-installing software and swapping and changing all the USB devices plugged in but basically everything is fine until you try to load the PC with the printer plugged in, despite if its turned off or on?

I told him to ring Dell tommorow but he doesnt have a breeze about PC's and the tech support for Dell is crazily poor sometimes(Mainly indian based techs that have no english trying to explain things in layman's terms).

So anyone got any suggestions?



On a seperate note I can't believe how much crap comes pre-installed on Dell PC's these days. Its very poor that as a brand new PC it takes so long to boot because of unecessary programs loading. I went to startup in msconfig and there must of been about 30+ processes pre-selected for startup. I have about 4 selected on my PC :eek:

mensreas

check the boot order in bios it could be trying to boot off the printer!!!! jus an idea"!!!

youcancallmeal

Yea checked the boot priority and I set the hard drive up as first on the list

Ruu_Old

Have you got another USB cable to try or download the latest printer driver incase the old one is a bit buggy? All I can think of right now.

aidan_walsh

Have you tried booting with any other USB devices in the slot? Or any other USB slot?

mensreas

have u tried uninstalling it rebootin hotplugin the printer and let windows find its own software for it??

youcancallmeal

mensreas wrote:

have u tried uninstalling it rebootin hotplugin the printer and let windows find its own software for it??

Yea reckon this is probably my best bet, I'll give it a shot tomorrow. Cheers

kaizersoze

youcancallme>al wrote:

Yea reckon this is probably my best bet, I'll give it a shot tomorrow. Cheers

The exact same thing came up for me tonight setting up a new Dell C521. Just getting back to it now to troubleshoot it. Error lights 2, 3 and 4 are on when it hangs during post. The Dell support doc says:

A possible USB failure has occurred.

Reinstall all USB devices, check cable
connections, and then restart the
computer.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dimC521/en/OM_EN/RP333A00.pdf
I'd say that you can rule out the printer and cable. I was setting up a Canon AIO printer and have tried 3 different cables. It's odd though. I had several USB devices connected to it already but the problem only occured when I installed the printer.
Will post more when I find the problem.

youcancallmeal

From doing a bit of googling it could be worth your while going into the BIOS and disabling 'Legacy USB support' or 'USB Emulation' as Dell sometimes call it? I'm going to try it later

kaizersoze

youcancallme>al wrote:

From doing a bit of googling it could be worth your while going into the BIOS and disabling 'Legacy USB support' or 'USB Emulation' as Dell sometimes call it? I'm going to try it later

Those USB settings don't exist in the new Dell BIOS, just a few options to enable/disable front USB ports.
Anywhoo, in my case it turned out that the printer and my Dlink USB wireless adapter didn't like being plugged in at the same time. On their own there was no problem but together it hung half way through POST.
Reinstalling the drivers makes no difference. It's some sort of hardware conflict that occurs during POST before any drivers are loaded.

feylya

Believe it or not but I have that exact same problem on my box. Fair enough, it's not a Dell or a printer stopping it loading but if I have a usb device plugged in (only a specific one), the machine won't boot beyond the ram check

youcancallmeal

Well after a week of troubleshooting I finally got it working. Firstly to get the PC to boot with the printer plugged in I had to go into the BIOS and select "No Boot" under the USB options. Basically there seems to be some compability issues between Dell's own printers and their PC's because it is picking the printer up as an external "bootable" USB device which it obviously will never be able to boot from. My friend doesnt plan on booting an operating system or likes from an external hard drive so its no worries set the USB option to "No Boot".

Problems weren't over there. The PC then wouldnt detect the printer when plugged in :rolleyes: After a lot of uninstall/re-installs and various other fiddling about I stumbled upon a few threads on the Dell community forums where people were having the same problem. Turns out Dell have been supplying 10ft usb cables with printers which are either just faulty or are too long? I replaced the 10ft cable with a much shorter one and bang its finally working!

I don't think I'll ever advise someone who isnt computer savvy to buy a Dell again, its just far to much hassle