Windows – Why won’t the Mac Mini with boot camp Windows 7 boot if I plug in a thunderbolt disk drive

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I have been using a previous generation mac mini server as a Windows 7 machine for the past two years without any issues. It was set up with boot camp and Windows 7 professional loaded on the internal SSD.
I would like to add to the amount of disk available by using a OWC Mercury elite pro Dual Thunderbolt disk that internally stripes two 3 TB drives making a 6 TB partition.
The machine boots fine with just a Mac monitor plugged in the thunderbolt.
What I insert the disk into the thunderbolt chain and attempt to boot the machine the boot sequence finds the Windows 7 partition on the SSD and then the screen goes black with only a single blinking underscore in the upper left corner.
The Machine and drive functions fine when plugged in using USB3.
I have critical reasons for wanting to use thunderbolt instead of USB3.

Best Answer

OWC Brittany C: there is a limitation on using a Thunderbolt device and Windows 7. Having a Thunderbolt device plugged in when trying to boot to Windows 7 will prevent boot. Also the machine will not detect a Thunderbolt device in Windows 7 unless it is plugged in upon start up. So basically thunderbolt devices are not going to work in Windows 7. You would need another operating system on that machine in order to boot with the device plugged-in when using Thunderbolt. Or Windows 8. They fixed the Thunderbolt bug in the Windows 8.

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