Unexpected bios behavior??? due to connection of an external drive.

jd1008 jd1008 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 17 23:23:30 UTC 2015


On this old dell (dual pentium), connecting the external
drive (a seagate 2TB external 2.5" "backup plus" drive.

When I got the drive, I connected it after booting into fedora.

Partition 1 contained some windows related stuff for backup.
I backed it up to another drive.

I partitioned the drive to two partitions only.
Partition 1 is the entire drive - minus 8GB).
Partition 2 is 8GB swap partition.
I formatted partition 2 ext4.

So far, so good.

Now, if I power up with this external drive connected (usb3),
all I get is a cursor at upper left corner.

If I disconnect the drive, reboot, then I get the Fedora boot menu, 
almost instantly.
Before I select which kernel to boot, I connect this external drive
and boot the latest kernel.

All is well.

So, what has remained on the external drive to cause bios
to hang like that?

This is the partition info:

Disk /dev/sdb: 1.8 TiB, 2000398933504 bytes, 3907029167 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 33553920 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x1c95003a

Device     Boot      Start        End    Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1             2048 3890251950 3890249903  1.8T 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2       3890288670 3907029166   16740497    8G 82 Linux swap / 
Solaris





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