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. However, the function keys don't seem to work.
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. The USB drives are just for data. I am using this machine as a "headless" server, and I ssh into it when I need to. I am pretty sure this is not a bios problem, as the machine has always booted from the internal drive, so it is set up that way. This odd behavior started after an apt-get update/upgrade quite awhile ago.
How can I get the machine to reboot correctly (straight to the hard drive)? Every time I update the beast, I have to crawl under the table to disconnect the usb drives, boot, then reconnect the drives.