Your situation sounds a bit like mine with a disk a few years ago.

I had a 2tb usb drive a few years ago, a WD usb disk that worked for about a week in my system without issue.  One day I had to reboot, and found the system just simply wouldn't even post bios or anything.  I'd actually forgotten about the disk as "the last new thing added" and began to freak out that my mobo died.  Eventual rational troubleshooting kicked, and I began removing hardware, which was just usb connections.  Rebooting it then it came right up, and narrowing things down, found it was that damn disk.

I ended up voiding the warranty and gutting the disk from their crappy enclosure to test in another generic one I had around, and it worked fine.

All I could presume was that the crappy little mass-mass produced usb chip was more unstable chinese garbage shipped in ignorance by vendors, and simply wrote it off.  It was a big reason I don't buy WD drives today, and or "pre-made" usb drives in general.

Almost every one I've ever had has been crap, and gets a fraction of the life of any other drive.  I presume disk vendors use thei mobility as an excuse to sell off the crap that doesn't pass enterprise or desktop QA, and thus gets shrifted down into something people expect to fail.

Best I can say is get a real desktop disk with a real warranty (more than the 1yr only usb disks always give you - with reason), and get yourself an external enclosure to diy.

-mb

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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