I have toggle switches on outlets to cut power. I have a server machine that I occasionally cut power from completely. Once the machine has been off the grid for a short amount of time, it tries to read an otherwise necessary USB dongle as a boot device, which halts the booting process.

Can I somehow disable the small storage on the dongle for it not to register as a possible boot device? Can I make it so that the dongle is read once you reach Windows? What are other possible solutions? Plugging the dongle off manually and then plugging it back in after boot works, but it is far from optimal.

I do not have a display on the machine, and I need the dongle to connect to it.

I turned USB boot off completely. I changed other boot settings as well, as in sorting the queue of which device to boot first. I changed the CMOS battery. I did not update the BIOS to it’s latest version, but the version is one lower than the newest one. I will need to wait for a flash drive to arrive via mail.