USB Booting Woes

[Anon Anon]

What does the partition structure look like on the USB drives? Are any of
the partitions marked as bootable mistakenly? I'd probably check the drives
first. Then I'd remove drives and get into the bios and see about disabling
all external boot options...

This may also be a good time to investigate a bios update if you have never
done it. I ascribe to the don't fix unless broken school on bios but this
may be a time to fix moment.

On Dec 10, 2016 08:23, "Mark Phillips" <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> 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.
>
> Any thoughts you might have on fixing this annoyance would be greatly
> appreciated!
>
> Mark
>
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