Really confusing boot problem

[swordsm3n]

I did a few modifications on my PC last night. Just a few small things, nothing major. I changed out some case fans, put in an another old hard drive from an old pc, added another fan to my cpu cooler, and put in a dvd and blu-ray player from an old pc. It worked fine last night. I obviously had to boot from the off state, and I did a couple restarts after driver installs for new hardware that was found.

For some reason when I turned on my PC this morning, it boots into some Dell recovery thing. This is not a Dell, and I have never owned a Dell. I tried unplugging the old hard drive and it still does this. There are no disks in the dvd/blu-ray players. This is a pc I built about a month ago and I have had 0 problems until now. Any thoughts?

Link to build http://pcpartpicker.com/p/zq7dsY

[swordsm3n]

Wow. It did this for the past 3 times I tried starting my pc, and it just stopped and booted into windows as normal. Still, any ideas why it was doing that?

Edit: Now the time is ahead by 21 hours. Freakin weird

[Gung Pow Chicken]

Have you been able to get into windows at all since this started happening?

What kind of malware / anti-virus software were you running before this issue started and what was on the old drive if you don't mind me asking.

[swordsm3n]

Yes. It just booted into Windows like normal. I know I will hear it for this one, but I dont have anything for malware/virus. Been running this PC about a month, never got around to it.

[Mesiah]

wild guess here:
 would it be possible that the old HDD would have a recovery partition from dell, that would have been loaded in ram .
so after rebooting several time without the hdd, your ram would have been flushed.

have you cleared CMOS at some point?

[swordsm3n]

The hard drive was from an old hp, but I had wiped that thing a long time ago since hp likes to send out their HDDs with 4 used partitions. So it would have had no recovery on it. 

The only time I cleared CMOS was when I was doing some OCing a couple weeks ago and went too far.

[Gung Pow Chicken]

21 minutes ago, swordsm3n said:

Yes. It just booted into Windows like normal. I know I will hear it for this one, but I dont have anything for malware/virus. Been running this PC about a month, never got around to it.

I would definitely look into that lol

Download Malwarebytes and Avast as both are free and good, see what they have to say about things.

Also you might check msconfig and see if anything is on the boot section from dell, do you have any dell exclusive software?

[swordsm3n]

I figured it out. When I put in that old hard drive, apparently it moved my Seagate exteral drive that I use miscellaneous file storage to the top of the boot order. No idea why, as I never messed with boot order. Another thing I am unsure of is why it has Dell software on it. It must have come preinstalled on that thing. It does have a partition on it called dbr_boot, which I never paid attention to before. But now that it has my attention, I think it probably stands for Dell backup and restore or something like that. Thanks for the help guys.

[Gung Pow Chicken]

You could reformat that partition or use like windirstat to remove that dell crap.

[swordsm3n]

I definitely will be removing it. I was really confused about it because I had never seen the Dell thing before and I have never owned a Dell product in my life. But my external had never been at the top of the boot order before either. Kind of funny though, as I should have checked my boot order first thing to see what was loading that. Live and learn lol

[Gung Pow Chicken]

What kind of external drive is it? I don't know why dell would have any bloatware on one unless it's a dell product lol.

This has got me oddly interested lol

[swordsm3n]

http://www.memory4less.com/mobile/m4l_pitemdetail.aspx?id=PD/lUN8XaR9mDKOO+1C6EA==&rid=90

This was the only link I could find for it, but it definitely did not cost over $300. They are out of their minds charging that much for a refurbished unit. I probably paid like 50 for it years ago. 

[Gung Pow Chicken]

1 minute ago, swordsm3n said:

http://www.memory4less.com/mobile/m4l_pitemdetail.aspx?id=PD/lUN8XaR9mDKOO+1C6EA==&rid=90

This was the only link I could find for it, but it definitely did not cost over $300. They are out of their minds charging that much for a refurbished unit. I probably paid like 50 for it years ago. 

That's so wierd, I would just find out where the files are and delete them lol