I fixed an unusual printing problems with a Brother MFC-665CW multi-function… while diagnosing the fault, I power cycled the printer (probably the first time the printer had been off for many months).

Two days later, the customer calls in a panic: My computer won’t start!

Since the PC was running slow a few days earlier, I suspected a motherboard issue.

Once there, I could see the bios screen, and then a blank screen with a blinking cursor in top left of the screen.

I go into the bios, and I notice that the boot options show an unusual order: USB printer first, then the hard drive, then the DVD drive.

It looks like the PC assumed the printer was a hard drive, tried to boot from it, and just sat there, waiting for a response from the printer.

The fix was easy: just change the boot sequence to be: DVD, then HDD, and remove the printer option.