It seems that your BIOS is doing something wrong by not accepting the
boot order OR that your boot process is corrupted somehow and the BIOS
is falling back to the USB after failing to boot from the HDD.
I have following ideas to explore:
1. You could try to reset the bios to defaults, reboot and try to set
the boot order again. That might help clearing up some invisible BIOS
issues.
2. see if your internal boot drive is marked as boot and if your MBR
(or your boot partition if your bios uses modern GPT partitioning) is
not corrupted. Refreshing Grub(2) should fix that.
3. See if your external USB drives are not flagged as boot drives. If
they are, then parted or gparted should be able to clear that up.
4. you could install grub2 in the USB disks MBR to boot from your
internal drives. That way, if BIOS gets it wrong, grub will boot what
you want anyway.
5. You could try to update the BIOS to get it working properly again
- though this might cause some unwelcome changes/risks.
I hope that you find the root cause :-)
Tomas
On Sat, 2016-12-10 at 13:28 -0700, Mark Phillips wrote:
> I have an old laptop running Linux version 4.8.0-1-amd64 (Debian
> 5.4.1-3)
> that I use as a "headless" server for backups and Plex. It has two
> USB
> drives attached to it for the backups and the media files.
>
> I have issues whenever I reboot the laptop. It appears to be trying
> to boot
> off the backup USB drive for hours, then gives up and goes to the
> internal
> hard drive and boots the rest of the way. It freezes in the initial
> bios
> boot up screen. F2 and F12 do not respond...it is as if the machine
> is
> frozen or dead, but eventually it does complete booting up. The last
> entry
> in the bios screen is the name of the back up USB drive, then it
> hangs for
> a long time. Eventually it gets to the next entry for the bios screen
> which
> is enabling the touchpad, and continues to boot from there.
>
> * In the bios, I changed the boot order to start with the internal
> hard
> drive, then the CD/DVD, and then the USB devices are disabled.
>
> * I moved mounting the usb drives from /etc/fstab to autofs, which
> seems to
> work just fine. Once the machine is running, I can access the two
> drives. I
> had the same booting issues when the drives were listed in
> /etc/fstab.
>
> * If I remove the backup USB drive and then reboot, the laptop boots
> normally and does not hang in the initial bios screen.
>
> * I tried moving the backup USB drive to another port (there are four
> in
> the laptop), but nothing changes.
>
> Some technical details on the drives -
>
> Hard drive the system should boot from:
>
> root@orca:/home/mark# fdisk -l /dev/sda
> Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x00043575
>
> Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
> /dev/sda1 * 2048 1920129023 1920126976 915.6G 83 Linux
> /dev/sda2 1920131070 1953523711 33392642 15.9G 5 Extended
> /dev/sda5 1920131072 1953523711 33392640 15.9G 82 Linux swap
> /
> Solaris
>
> Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
>
> backup USB
>
> root@orca:/home/mark# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
> Disk /dev/sdb: 2.7 TiB, 3000558944256 bytes, 732558336 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x00028375
>
> Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
> /dev/sdb1 256 732558335 732558080 2.7T 83 Linux
>
> Plex media USB. NTFS because I trade media with folks who only have
> Windoze. I use fuse to access it.
>
> root@orca:/home/mark# fdisk -l /dev/sdc
> Disk /dev/sdc: 1.8 TiB, 2000365289472 bytes, 3906963456 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x48f9a2e9
>
> Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
> /dev/sdc1 2048 3906963455 3906961408 1.8T 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
>
> Any thoughts you might have on fixing this annoyance would be greatly
> appreciated!
>
> Mark
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