Strange booting problem

[Gordon Messmer]

On 06/30/2015 03:41 PM, jd1008 wrote:
> So, it begs the question:

(that's not what "begs the question" means)

> Can I create a disk with msdos partitioning scheme,
> none of the partitions marked as bootable, and have bios
> quickly skip over it to the next device in the boot sequence? 

So far it looks like the answer is "no" or "it depends on your BIOS."

Both SeaBIOS and your Dell BIOS, based on what we've seen, will attempt 
to use the boot sector of a disk with a valid MBR, even when the boot 
sector is all zeros.  That's consistent with all of the documentation I 
can find.  It's possible that other BIOS might skip an all-zero boot 
sector, but we don't have any documentation of which systems behave that 
way.

However, also based on testing, it seems that if you used GPT for your 
partitions, then BIOS would skip over the drive during the boot 
process.  So, maybe that's a solution?  The only reasons I can think of 
to use MBR are a) you have an operating system that can't read GPT and 
b) you need to boot from the drive under BIOS.  I don't think either of 
those apply to you.