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
On 12/10/2016 08:23 AM, Mark Phillips
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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