Strange booting problem

[jd1008]

On 06/30/2015 05:02 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 06/30/2015 03:41 PM, jd1008 wrote:
>> So, it begs the question:
>
> (that's not what "begs the question" means)
For my case it does cause me to ask : The conundrum of my situation
does indeed lead me to ask that question.
If you think it does not mean that - then please enlighten everyone
as to what it 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.
Since my internal drive is dual boot, I do need to boot an OS that does not
recognize GPT :(

So, if I use GPT, then, bios will skip over it if it comes before the 
internal boot disk?

I will test that on a usb disk.