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.

If neither of those work, you might try putting GRUB onto one or both of them, with all GRUB entries pointing to the actual hard drive (or at least make the default entry be the correct drive).

From: PLUG-discuss [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Mark Phillips
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2016 3:17 PM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Debian Testing boot

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.

Thanks,

Mark