USB Booting Woes

[Eric Oyen]

has this always been an issue, or did it start relatively recently. if the latter, you might have something on board going bad on you.

-eric
Home office of the Technomage guild.

On Dec 10, 2016, at 8:57 AM, Mark Phillips wrote:

> There are three disks in the system. sda = internal hard drive, sdb = backup USB, sdc = plex USB.
> 
> The hard drive is the only one that is marked as bootable. It hangs on the backup USB and not the plex USB.
> 
> It still hangs if I disable all but the hard drive for booting.
> 
> root at orca:/home/mark# fdisk -l /dev/sda
> Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x00043575
> 
> Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
> /dev/sda1  *          2048 1920129023 1920126976 915.6G 83 Linux
> /dev/sda2       1920131070 1953523711   33392642  15.9G  5 Extended
> /dev/sda5       1920131072 1953523711   33392640  15.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
> 
> Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
> 
> 
> root at orca:/home/mark# fdisk -l /dev/sdb
> Disk /dev/sdb: 2.7 TiB, 3000558944256 bytes, 732558336 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x00028375
> 
> Device     Boot Start       End   Sectors  Size Id Type
> /dev/sdb1         256 732558335 732558080  2.7T 83 Linux
> 
> 
> root at orca:/home/mark# fdisk -l /dev/sdc
> Disk /dev/sdc: 1.8 TiB, 2000365289472 bytes, 3906963456 sectors
> Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
> Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
> Disklabel type: dos
> Disk identifier: 0x48f9a2e9
> 
> Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors  Size Id Type
> /dev/sdc1        2048 3906963455 3906961408  1.8T  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
> root at orca:/home/mark# 
> 
> Mark
> 
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 8:28 AM, Anon Anon <lokotejones at gmail.com> wrote:
> What does the partition structure look like on the USB drives? Are any of the partitions marked as bootable mistakenly? I'd probably check the drives first. Then I'd remove drives and get into the bios and see about disabling all external boot options...
> 
> This may also be a good time to investigate a bios update if you have never done it. I ascribe to the don't fix unless broken school on bios but this may be a time to fix moment.
> 
> On Dec 10, 2016 08:23, "Mark Phillips" <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz> 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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