Presence of USB media during V5 Pre-Boot can result in very slow boot into Windows (e.g. Minutes)
On certain machines, if a USB stick is attached at power-on, the Windows OS loading time is very slow (several minutes). Most users will find this delay to be unacceptable
The reason is Windows loader tries to access the USB disk/media recognized by the BIOS, which had earlier been recognized by the Linux Pre-Boot Loader and then discarded as the V5 Linux Pre-Boot environment is dropped in favor of loading Windows.
After V5 boot-code completes and goes out of scope/memory, the USB stack to access the USB stick was relinquished/destroyed by the V5.x Linux-based Pre-Boot, and therefore the BIOS can't re-read that USB media again and goes into a long wait-state attempting to do so.
On certain DELL machines, when accessing the USB stick, the BIOS call will fail after a long time-out that delays the boot process into Windows.
Solutions for this:
1. Easiest - Ensure there are no inserted USB memory sticks during BIOS initialization. If the user wishes to use USB memory sticks during the V5 pre-boot, recommended that the stick be inserted AFTER the preboot window shows up
2. Disable USB legacy/boot support in BIOS
3. Enable Y-mode 0x20 bit (Set Special Y-Mode = 20, either by sending down a revised profile, by altering it the Pre-Boot environment or by changing it in teh SecureDoc client Control Center.
NOTE re: Option 3 above: Special Y-Mode=20 was introduced in V5.3 SR2
When Y-Mode is set to 20, the Linux-based V5 Pre-Boot will scan USB disks/media and build a block list for BIOS access.
After pre-boot authentication succeeds, Windows OS loader loading time will be normal.
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• Version: SecureDoc 5.3 SR2