Strange booting problem

[Gordon Messmer]

On 06/30/2015 03:18 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 2. The most likely explanation for the problem, as someone else
> alluded to, is the USB drive has stale bootloader code on it that
> points to no where and hangs.

One of jd's earlier messages included the boot sector.  It was mostly 
nul bytes.

> The solution is to do one of two things: change the boot order in
> BIOS; or zero the first 440 bytes of LBA 0 with this:
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=440 count=1

Why 440?  The boot sector is 446 bytes.

We've already established that his BIOS will attempt to boot the system 
when the first 440 bytes are zeros.  That was the situation we've been 
discussing all thread long.