Debian Testing boot

[Matt Graham]

> Mark Phillips wrote:
>> I have an older laptop running Debian testing with two USB drives
>> attached. If I remove the drives, it boots normally. If I leave the
>> drives connected, it gets stuck at the first boot screen where it 
>> asks
>> to go into the boot menu.

>> I suspect that the machine is confused and may think it can boot from
>> the usb drives. I only want it to boot from the internal hard drive.
On 2016-11-17 15:44, Carruth, Rusty wrote:
> Can you tell the BIOS to not ever use the USB drives?
> If not, can you make the BIOS have the real hard drive be the first
> thing it tries? (think ‘Boot order’) That should be settable in the
> BIOS even when you’re working the settings without a USB device
> connected.

Yes, that.

It might also be useful to check the USB disks with fdisk (or gparted) 
and make sure that none of the partitions on the disks are marked 
"bootable".  Typically, the BIOS won't boot from a partition that 
doesn't have the bootable flag set.  (It might if the disk has an 
ISO9660 bootable image on it, but it's unlikely you have that going on 
if you're using the USB disks to store data.)  Your BIOS might be doing 
something very stupid, but some combination of the above things should 
make the laptop work properly.

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