Strange booting problem

[Tim]

On Wed, 2015-06-24 at 18:36 -0600, jd1008 wrote:
> OK, so how long before bios times out and move on
> to the internal HD? The usb drive, which is
> NOT bootable, has no booter installed, and
> neither one of it's partitions are bootable:

Some BIOSs will not do that.

I have one PC that cannot be booted if there's a USB drive (of any kind)
plugged in, despite the BIOS being set to boot from the HDD first.

I had another PC that cannot be secured.  You can set BIOS passwords,
and save the BIOS to only boot from the HDD.  But *before* the BIOS is a
wide-open boot menu that cannot be locked down, so someone could easily
bypass your security measures to boot from some other drive.

Some manufactures are just crap at programming their motherboards.  And
if they weren't closed source, we could do something about it.

Yes, I'm aware that there are open source BIOSs, but you can't just
replace the BIOS on *any* motherboard that you happen to have.

-- 
tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp

Linux 3.19.8-100.fc20.i686 #1 SMP Tue May 12 17:42:35 UTC 2015 i686

All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying
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George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not
a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments.